Best Little Stories from the Civil War

by Kelly, C. Brian

• ISBN13: 9781402239106
• ISBN10: 1402239106
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-03-01
• Publisher: Cumberland House

Summary

"This fascinating book will make the Civil War come alive with thoughts and feelings of real people." The Midwest Book Review The Civil WAR You Never Knew... Behind the bloody battles, strategic marches, and decorated generals lie more than 100 intensely personal, true stories you haven't heard before. In Best Little Stories from the Civil War, soldiers describe their first experiences in battle, women observe the advances and retreats of armies, spies recount their methods, and leaders reveal the reasoning behind many of their public actions. Fascinating characters come to life, including: Former U.S. Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, who warned the Confederate cabinet not to fall for Lincoln's trap by firing on reinforcements, thereby allowing Lincoln to claim the South had fired the first shots of the war at Fort Sumter. Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut, who disbanded the 13th Independent Battery, Ohio Light Artillery, scattered its men, gave its guns to other units, and ordered its officers home, accusing all of cowardly performance in battle. Thomas N. Conrad, a Confederate spy operating in Washington, who warned Richmond of both the looming Federal Peninsula campaign in the spring of 1863 and the attack at Fredericksburg later that year. Private Franklin Thomson of Michigan, born as Sarah Emma Edmonds, who fought in uniform for the Union during the war and later was the only female member of the postwar Union Grand Army of the Republic.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. ix
Select Guide to Battles & Personalities	p. xii
Portents	p. 1
Beginnings	p. 13
First Time Out	p. 14
Fresh Start Sought	p. 16
Who the South Was	p. 20
Fate Makes a Choice	p. 22
Racing to War	p. 24
Better Angels Invoked	p. 26
Social Notice Taken	p. 27
Lincoln Wins Rebel Debate	p. 29
Sumter's Silence	p. 30
Stomach Pumping Questioned	p. 32
Robert and Mary	p. 33
Spy with a Future	p. 36
Swinging His Arms	p. 37
A “Bear” Installed	p. 39
Death of a Congressman	p. 42
Most Famous Shooter	p. 44
Perfect Storm of Bullets	p. 46
At Every Shot a Convulsion	p. 48
First Postmortem	p. 51
Sherman's Threat Appealed	p. 53
Head of the Passes	p. 55
Heart in the Throat	p. 58
Good Times…and Bad	p. 60
Staggering Stats	p. 62
Middles	p. 65
Hello, Washington	p. 66
No Panacea for Politicians	p. 68
Brave Deed Recorded	p. 71
Complete Conquest Required	p. 73
Secession from Secession	p. 75
Soldier A-Courting	p. 77
Battery Disbanded	p. 80
“Granny” Lee	p. 83
Stirring Words Found	p. 86
Jackson's Odd Failure	p. 87
Hello, Richmond	p. 91
Loyalty Charge Dismissed	p. 95
Poignant Moments in Battle	p. 98
Unnecessary Tragedies	p. 101
Knights of the Realm	p. 105
Six-Year-Old's Flight	p. 108
Davises Everywhere	p. 109
Capitalism at Andersonville	p. 111
Jaws of Death	p. 113
Bride Left Behind	p. 115
Audible, Not Visible	p. 116
Spank the Boys	p. 120
Injury Added to Insult	p. 122
Family Affair	p. 124
Miss Kate's Brief Run	p. 127
Escape from Success	p. 130
Faces in the Crowd	p. 133
Red Shirt, White Shirt	p. 137
More Than a Few Ghosts	p. 139
“Shot for You”	p. 141
No Whizz, Bang Heard	p. 143
Women of the Times	p. 146
Woman at the Lead	p. 150
Road to Gettysburg	p. 151
Love Story	p. 154
Coincidences at Gettysburg	p. 156
Old White Oak	p. 160
Black Faces in the Crowd	p. 161
Gettysburg Facts, Stats	p. 164
Lee Family Saga, Continued	p. 166
Three Generals Named Winfield	p. 168
Cat Parties Ended	p. 170
The Fighting McCooks	p. 172
Sidling Down to Richmond	p. 173
Friendly Boost Given	p. 175
“Down, You Fool!”	p. 176
Brave Men Spared	p. 178
Christmas	p. 179
What Does a Slave?	p. 181
More Staggering Stats	p. 186
Endings	p. 189
Old Abe the Soldier Bird	p. 190
Bleak Holiday	p. 192
Unlucky John Bell Hood	p. 195
“On, Wisconsin…On!”	p. 198
Longest Siege	p. 201
Each to His Own Pathway	p. 205
Squint to His Eye	p. 206
Ugly Blows Exchanged	p. 207
They Also Served	p. 211
Story with a Kick	p. 214
Two More to Mourn	p. 216
Embarrassing Outing	p. 219
Surviving to Serve Again	p. 221
Hospital Town	p. 224
So Very Personal	p. 226
No Opportunity for Surrender	p. 229
Parallel Spies	p. 230
Acquiring a New Name	p. 235
Close Connections	p. 237
Lee's Final Order	p. 240
Julia Reads a Note	p. 240
Freedom Still Denied	p. 244
Surprisingly Kind Fate	p. 246
Always a Clear Course	p. 248
War's Sting Delayed	p. 250
Pair for Two	p. 252
Final Glimpses	p. 253
An Arlington Postmortem	p. 257
The Lincoln Memorial: A Postscript	p. 260
The Civil War's Two First Ladies	p. 265
Varina: Forgotten First Lady	p. 266
Mary Todd Lincoln: Troubled First Lady	p. 279
The Civil War—A Short Chronology	p. 309
Acknowledgments	p. 311
Select Bibliography	p. 312
Index	p. 317
About the Authors	p. 334
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

<p><em>Excerpt from the Introduction</em></p><p>Here's our premise: History can be told in <em>little </em>bits and pieces as well as in heavyweight and multi-volume tomes.</p><p>All too often, even the best recitals of great events can overlook the basic human story lurking behind those same great events. And that's where our series of Best Little Stories historical books comes into the picture. That's us-history as short, narrative bits.</p><p>But...can that work?</p><p>Reviewer Craig. K. Allen seemed to think so, seemed to catch both the intent and flavor of our approach in the Macon (Georgia) <em>Telegraph </em>when he described our <em>Best Little Stories from the White House </em>as "a genre not quite practiced by anyone else" and said the book's stories "possess the immediacy of a front-page newspaper article."</p><p>Also gratifying was the reaction of Bill Ruelhmann, Books columnist at the Norfolk (Virginia) <em>Virginian Pilot</em>, back in 2002 to our newly published <em>Best Little Stories from the Wild West</em>. Our digging for "historical gold" in "mundane earth," he wrote at that time, had enabled us to "prise forth glittering nuggets of nifty narrative that, packed tight in the thick treasure boxes of their paperbound anthologies, make for truly priceless reading."</p><p>Thanks of course to Craig and Bill. But how does it work, you may be asking. <em>Best Little Stories</em>, we say? Exactly what does that mean? Well, as I wrote in an earlier edition of this, the first of our three Best Little Stories Civil War books, I once was a newspaperman. I always looked for the good, i.e., the <em>best</em>, story. Be it cheerful, light and frothy, or hard-hitting, sad, poignant-it didn't matter. Just the good story. The kind the reader would read. No "message," just the unusual, the obscure, the fascinating...the gripping, the touching <em>human </em>story. When I turned to history as the first editor of <em>Military History </em>and <em>World War II </em>magazines, I was inclined from the start to treat history as journalism-to look for the little nuggets gleaming with pathos, cheer, tragedy, irony-the human-interest stories in history.</p><p>Together with my wife and book collaborator Ingrid, I came to call them <em>Best Little Stories </em>in this and our companion historical books (there are nine total as of this writing). <em>Little </em>in part because, yes, the stories may be shorter than historical accounts. But also because in most cases, they focus more on the individual person at, say, Gettysburg, rather than simply report the size of the armies, who won the battle and how they did so.</p><p>Rather than write a straightforward, fact-filled-but potentially dull-short biography of U. S. Grant as the Union general who finally won the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln, it's far more interesting to recall the <em>little </em>moment when he led his troops toward his first conflict of the entire Civil War with very human fear and trepidation: "[M]y heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois."</p><p>And then, delicious irony, the enemy he expected to meet just over the brow of the next hill was gone, decamped.</p><p>In like fashion, it's one thing to take note that the landscape of the Civil War was often peopled by black slaves (keyword: <em>peopled</em>), but it's important also to cite their own individual experiences, whether it's Booker T. Washington recalling his first moments of freedom, Frederick Douglass reciting his brutal treatment before escaping to freedom, or other, far lesser-known slaves telling their own stories. Or, for that matter, the tale of how the young, newly freed black youth named Booker finally acquired a last name.</p><p>But this isn't a book all about soldiers and slaves, which, to judge by many historical accounts, were the principal parties of the Civil War. Instead, our Civil War stories often are about the average civilian, sometimes even special groups. For instance: Congress.</p><p>Or, more precisely, read in the pages to follow about a member of Congress who had to ride to his nation's capital in an unheated freight car, then had to wear unlaundered shirts and socks for many days at a time, while his wife and children remained at home under constant threat of invasion. Such was life, not all that unusual a case, actually, for a member of Congress from Georgia-the <em>Confederate </em>Congress meeting in Richmond, that is.</p><p>Were conditions that much better in Washington, D.C., the Union capital and home to the United States Congress? Undoubtedly, yes. But it's easy for us to forget that the Federal capital was an incomplete, even primitive urban center by modern standards. "Not a sewer blessed the town, nor off of Pennsylvania Avenue was there a paved gutter," wrote Ohio Congressman Albert G. Riddle, albeit with perhaps some exaggeration.</p><p>Meanwhile, First Bull Run in the first July of the Civil War was a rout of the Federal forces defending the same Washington, D.C., correct? Quite so, and so easy to recite today as part of any listing of the major battles of the Civil War. But the real sense of the panic among the retreating Union forces comes through from the onlooking Congressman Riddle's own eyewitness account of the retreat.</p><p>As he later recalled, "The poor, demented, exhausted wretches, who could not climb into the high, closed baggage wagons, made frantic efforts to get onto and into our carriage."</p><p>The same terrified soldiers grabbed at every handhold they could find, he added with little apparent sympathy. "We had to be rough with them and thrust them out and off." Even so, one of the fleeing "wretches"-a Union major at that-managed to pull himself aboard the congressman's carriage, "and we lugged the pitiful coward a mile or so." And then? "Finally I opened the door, and he tumbled-or was tumbled out."</p><p>Women, too, make up the annals of history, along with history's best little stories, to be sure. So it is that my wife and collaborator Ingrid has written the twin biographies appearing at the end herein of the Civil War's twin First Ladies, Mrs. Jefferson Davis (<em>Varina: Forgotten First Lady</em>, page 266) and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln (<em>Mary Todd Lincoln: Troubled First Lady</em>, page 279). As indicated a few lines ago, this is not the first edition of <em>Best Little Stories from the Civil War </em>but rather the third-with brand new material added-thanks to a kind reception by the reading public for which we, the authors, are exceedingly grateful.</p><p>While hoping our latest set of readers will enjoy our approach to history, I can still wonder, as I did in the introduction to our 1998 edition: Is journalism but a facet of history, or is history but another form of journalism?</p><p>C. Brian Kelly<br>Charlottesville, Virginia, 2010</p>