a number of us set out last Sunday morning, on a spectacular Shenandoah Valley day

[above: historic Pritchard House on the Kernstown Battlefield]

With Scott Patchan's Cedar Creek issue of Blue & Gray in hand, a number of us set out last Sunday morning, on a spectacular Shenandoah Valley day, to visit the parking lots, ditches, and medians where interpretation of that battle is most easily conveyed. Best of all, however, was the stop at Belle Grove, where rolling pastures and lines of sight made it somewhat easier to envision the events of 1864, the quarry notwithstanding. Our guide eschewed a visit to the visitor center as part of one of the preservation world's ongoing feuds. All in all, it was another memorable gathering for the intrepid members of The Civil War Forum. All of this week, we've been voting on next year's (Western) venue, and early returns point to New Orleans. Here are a few photos from last week (click to enlarge):













Above, site of John Brown's scaffold, Charles Town, West Virginia; below, Kennedy Farm where Brown plotted, near Harpers Ferry













left: Steve Meserve,
inveterate tour guide,
historian par excellence,
misguided football fan







Scott Patchan, and Steve

















Above: The Pritchard House

saturday road notes

Lucked out on the rain again today, making for some fine touring. It's a powerful thing to see for the first time the results of preservation efforts you participated in from afar, years ago. The Third Winchester tracts are impressive. Likewise Fisher's Hill. This second, chock-full day wrapped up at Toms Brook. If I'm not mistaken, we walked through part of a dedicated frisbee-golf course to get to the marker. Scott Patchan regaled the attendees this evening with a detailed examination of the life of Phil Sheridan. Many folks are heading home in the morning, but about 20 of us will spend four hours at Cedar Creek with Scott. Shoot -- I forgot to go to bed again.

friday road notes

Two experiences in Virginia Civil War history on the same day illustrate two ends of a spectrum. We got out our box lunches near some markers at the heart of the Rutherford's Farm/Stephenson's Depot battlefield. These markers are on an island between the highway and the new Lowe's parking lot. It is a sea of striped blacktop now. By contrast, the visit to the Cool Spring battlefield was a bucolic walk through a pristine pasture, to the banks of the Shenandoah. Favorite stop of the day: the 1854 Pritchard House on the Kernstown battlefield. All praise due to the Kernstown Battlefield Association. Photos to follow. The evening was capped off nicely with a very entertaining and informative talk by Stevan Meserve on Tom Rosser.

13th Civil War Forum Battlefield Conference

THE 1864 SHENANDOAH VALLEY CAMPAIGN

We have 43 people signed up for what promises to be another deeply informative and memorable series of tours and talks later this month, headquartered in Winchester. There are still several seats available, if you're interested in attended. It's a fun group of people—many who have been to most or all of the past conferences, some who signed on in recent years, and always a handful of welcome first-timers.

It's a great deal: $275 for two full days of bus tours (with box lunches), two half days of tours by carpool, and three evening buffet dinners with after-dinner presentations by our historians Scott Patchan and Stevan Meserve. The Civil War Forum continues to sponsor the best tours, with the best guides, for as low a cost as possible. Anything left over goes to The Civil War Preservation Trust.

Among other sites, we'll spend much of our two days of bus tours with Scott visiting Cool Spring/Snickers Gap—including a walk down to the river and a visit to the Parker House; 2nd Kernstown Battlefield, 3rd Winchester Battlefield, Fisher’s Hill and Tom's Brook. On Sunday morning we'll finish up with four hours at Cedar Creek.

For early arrivals, we have an optional 4-hour outing planned for Thursday afternoon to Charles Town, WV to visit John Brown-related sites, including the Kennedy Farm, where Brown and his men hid out while preparing their raid, the Jefferson County Museum—whose collection includes the Stuart Horse Artillery flag, John Brown pikes and memorabilia, and the wagon that took Brown to the gallows—the courthouse where Brown was tried, and the gallows site, plus a walking tour of the town. Our guide for Thursday will be Stevan Meserve, whose stellar research isn't limited to Loudoun County, the subject of a nice Civil War history he published last year.

For registration information and updates, click here.

The best Antietam hike you've never taken

(unless you were with Tom Clemens two weeks ago)

Brian Downey over at Behind AotW has put together one of the most interesting campaign-related blog entries I've ever read.

On the Trail of the Corn Exchange Regiment

146 years to the day after the historical events, a lucky group of us tracked the unlucky 118th Pennsylvania Volunteers to the places and views of the Battle of Shepherdstown Ford (20 September 1862). Under the capable guidance of Dr Tom Clemens and members of the Shepherdstown Battlefield Preservation Association (SBPA), we waded the Potomac, scaled the heights, and walked the field.

Most interesting are descriptions of the river bottom (rocky, not muddy, with stretches of smooth, wagon-friendly slabs of stone). Twelve years ago, the Civil War Forum folks at CompuServe held their inaugural annual gathering at Antietam, with Tom Clemens as our guide. He's as good as they get. If Tom can be imposed upon to reprise this river crossing, I'll be on board for that one. In your visit to Behind AotW, be sure to visit the SBPA site (linked to in the paragraph above).

John Y. Simon, R.I.P.

The Grant project consumed him. . . . He worked on it every day, his wife said. “It was daily, it was weekends and it was most holidays,” she said. “Some holidays not all day.”

So said Mrs. Simon about Mr. Simon, as quoted in his New York Times obituary.

I never met John Simon in person, but I did correspond with him, and spoke with him on the phone once. He wrote the foreword to Civil War High Commands, the publication of which was one highlight of my time at Stanford University Press. In the realm of true Civil War scholars, John Simon was one of the great ones. And not just for his work, which will be an enduring legacy, but he scores especially high to me because he was unpretentious—the antithesis of pompous. Not that I knew him well, but the pompous ones can’t hide it. They are, in fact, unconscious of it, or else they wouldn’t be pompous.

No one knew more about Ulysses S. Grant. None of us can even appreciate the debt we owe to John Simon for the work he did, and most of us will never directly perceive how even the scholars among us will make use of the hours he logged. He made a serious contribution. “Some holidays not all day.” That says it all. [Of course the children of parents who work all the time, even on holidays, will naturally have a different take on the matter.]

Continuing my lazy (but exclusive and previously unpublished!) blogging of late, here are parts of a Q&A session Dr. Simon granted to the Civil War Forum on September 29, 2000.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Dr. Simon, you've been editing The Papers since 1962. Are you getting tired of Grant yet, or still finding new information, or new sides to the man?

A. (John Simon): I've never thought that I understood the man fully, and for that reason I've never become tired of him. People don't ask you questions like that about your wife, and I've been married to her for a long time. Grant's a very real person, and one with many dimensions to him. There's still more to learn and I'm eager to do it. We're into the presidential years now, but I'm still fascinated by the Civil War period. And there are documents that we haven't found yet, but those that are coming to light, almost daily, cast new perspectives on Grant.

Q. (Civil War Forum): What do you think, based on your readings of his correspondence, may be the biggest misconceptions about Grant? Was there anything that you were surprised to learn, or which slowly changed your perception of him?

A. (John Simon): Well I've been increasingly impressed by what a good writer he is. He has the capacity to express what he's thinking in the clearest possible form. He's a maker of memorable phrases. One of our interesting discoveries many years ago was when he wrote the famous line about fighting it out on this line if it takes all summer, he originally wrote, "If it takes me all summer." Then he went back and crossed out the word "me." He's conscious of just who's doing that fighting, and knows that that word "me" is inappropriate. Normally, the words just flow out as they did in the celebrated letter that he wrote at Appomattox, but when necessary he revised what he was writing.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Do Grant's writings give some clue as to why he seemed so centered and sure of himself in wartime but somewhat vulnerable and a fish out of water in civilian life?

A. (John Simon): I would say that they really don't. That, in fact, Grant is a far more assured figure in the White House than most people have recognized. He does have a centered presence in political life, as well as in military life. I don't believe that he understood politics well enough to be the great president that people anticipated, but he's a man who is always in touch with himself, and conscious of what he wanted to do. He's like other presidents who have had the misfortune of serving two terms. Like Bill Clinton, he turned 50 between his 1st and 2nd terms, and it's tantalizing to think what might have happened to Clinton had he not served a 2nd term.
In Grant's case, the unanticipated Depression of 1873 put him at something of a loss, especially since he had lost the flexibility with which he entered the White House. He settled into the job of serving as president, and quite possibly he would have done better to leave the White House after the achievements of the first term. Nonetheless, I don't think his position as president has ever received the appraisal it should have. In years gone by he was criticized for his upholding of the Reconstruction policy—he was later condemned for not having enforced it more fully. He's had it from both sides. From some presidents much is expected; from some it's considered a miracle that they haven't fallen on their faces. Grant entered the White House with such keen expectations that he'd govern the country with the same skill with which he'd won the war, that his low reputation as president has more to do with high expectations than with weak performance.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Have you gotten a sense from his Presidential writings as to what kind of South he wanted to see emerge from Reconstruction (and as for not being tough enough on enforcement of Reconstruction, one shudders at the thought of what would have happened if Seymour and Blair had won)?

A. (John Simon): That's a good point, especially about Grant's Democratic opponents. The problem that Grant faced with regard to Reconstruction was the same problem that Gunnar Myrdal called "an American dilemma," and it remains one. What's different about Grant, perhaps, is the sense of the military commander who had won the war with the aid of a significant number of black troops—perhaps more than 10 percent of his military force—when the war ended. Like other generals, he had a responsibility to his veterans after the war, one that he never forgot. He was perhaps lagging a bit in understanding the full capacities of black Americans, but when their rights were trampled on and abused, he knew what he wanted to do, and was determined to do it. When he left the White House, the Ku Klux Klan had been crushed. Perhaps the kind of Reconstruction that in retrospect seems preferable was beyond his imagination, but the retreat from Reconstruction was something that he abhorred. Blacks voted more freely in 1872 than they would for another 100 years.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Did Grant want to run for a third term? Did he use his world trip to "prepare" for it?

A. (John Simon): In 1876, if he had chosen to be receptive, he could have been renominated. He wrote a letter in 1875 stating clearly that he did not want a third term, mailed it, then later told his wife, who was disappointed. The Grant's had never lived anywhere as long as they'd lived in the White House. I don't think that Grant planned the tour around the world with the thought of returning to the presidency. If he had, he would have stayed away longer and his triumphant return would have been better timed. His supporters pushed him for a third term. He gave them relatively little encouragement, but as the matter went to the convention, there was no doubt that it was somewhat painful to Grant to lose anything, including that nomination.
It should be remembered that Grant had never wanted to be president in the first place, that he went through 2 terms in the White House complaining about the job, calling it "uncongenial," and reminding people when he was spoken of for a third term that he hadn't even wanted the first. I think he ought to be taken at his word. He preferred to be commander of the army in peacetime, a job with a steady income. Even in the 1870s he reminded the father of the young man who was going to marry his daughter that while he did have a good job with a good salary, it was a temporary position. As someone who had really experienced poverty as a grown man, lifetime employment had a special meaning for him, and the ironic twist on the Grant story is his encounter with a Wall Street crook who left him impoverished in his old age.

Q. (Civil War Forum): What was Grant's private opinion of Abraham Lincoln and how did Grant take the news of Lincoln's murder (especially since the Grants had begged off going to the theater that night with the Lincolns)?

A. (John Simon): An excellent question. The private opinion is very difficult to recover, because Grant is conscious of Lincoln as Commander in Chief. At the same time, Mary Lincoln's behavior had become steadily more irrational, and she made it clear that she resented and disliked Mrs. Grant. They begged off going to the theater on the grounds that they wanted to visit their children. It made sense, but I don't think they relished the idea of spending an evening with Mary Lincoln. Later on, Grant would speak of Lincoln in glowing terms, and I think he was deeply distressed by the assassination. He stood in the Rotunda where the body lay in state and he was weeping—he came to a realization of what Lincoln had done to win the war, and to sustain Grant in the process. His thoughts about Lincoln were no doubt colored by his intense dislike of Andrew Johnson. In retrospect, Lincoln looked even greater than he had to Grant on the eve of the assassination.

Q. (Civil War Forum): I've always liked the anecdote relating how Grant got involved in the war: leaning in the doorway of his shop in Galena, criticizing the local militia, and they tell him to put his money where his mouth his. Is it true? And more importantly, was his involvement in the war inevitable, or did he just get caught up by chance?

A. (John Simon): That's a good question. Grant has a firm sense of responsibility. This is the factor that kept him in the U.S. Army after he graduated from the military academy, and really didn't want to be a soldier, preferring a career as a teacher. But he'd been educated at government expense, and thought he had an obligation and was drawn into the Mexican War. In 1861, even though he'd been out of the army since 1854, he knew that he had a responsibility to use his military training and his 15 years of military experience for his country. There really was no issue there—he knew he had to go. Beyond that, he hated that leather store in Galena passionately. He liked being out of the army and with his family, but those obligations were much stronger than what might be considered his comfort. As for Grant taking a passive attitude at first when the war broke out, there's really no evidence for that. He'd been caught up in the political turmoil that preceded the war, and as a northern man who had an anti-slavery father, but who'd been treated better by his wife's family—Missouri slaveholders—he was conscious of the issues involved.

Q. (Civil War Forum): I'm interested in the relationship between Grant and his wife Julia. Some have accused Grant of being henpecked by her; to me, it looks like they had a pretty good relationship. What is the reality, in your opinion?

A. (John Simon): The story of Grant's marriage is apparently a love story from beginning to end. Part of the attraction that Julia had for Grant was her spirited nature. She thought for herself. She expressed her opinions. And Grant found her charming, from their first meeting to the end of his life. He loved to tease her. And in that respect, sometimes pretended that she was a pushy woman, but any impression that gives that he was indeed henpecked is misleading. There's no doubt who was the head of that household. No doubt in Grant's mind, none in Julia's either. But above all, they were a couple, devoted to each other.

Q. (Civil War Forum): I assume you are familiar with W.E. Woodward's 1928 work, "Meet General Grant." If so, how well do you think he interpreted Grant's personality?

A. (John Simon): The Woodward book marks a low point in Grant's reputation. Woodward was a southerner, and also a celebrated debunker, and he used his literary skills on Grant at a time when racism was rampant in American life. And it was possible to convince people that somehow the Civil War was a gigantic mistake growing out of misunderstandings between North and South, that it accomplished nothing, and that any good results from the perspective of the 1920s would have come about inevitably through peaceful means. This is a point of view that has long been discredited. I think beyond that, that Woodward never understood Grant, saw him as a kind of wooden figure moving on the stage of American history, not having any motive force of his own.
And the modern version of Woodward, but written from a completely different political perspective, is the 1981 McFeely biography of Grant. I think that these are writers who achieved considerable success with Grant biographies, but in both cases their interpretations are outdated.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Grant always seemed to have the edge on his opponents—finding their weaknesses and exploiting them weather it be in the military or political arena. He took the initiative and seized the moment. Is that a fair characterization?

A. (John Simon): I think that's a good question. Basically, Grant had excelled at West Point in mathematics, and he had a sense of approaching problems logically in both the military and the political field. Especially in wartime, the emotional component is likely to take over in many commanders, but rarely in the case of Grant. The problems he faced in command were to him logical problems of applying the requisite force at the necessary point. Another factor is his unpredictability—the campaign against Vicksburg, which was hailed as a military masterpiece, did not become a template for future campaigns. . . And when Lee had been so successful in outguessing and outfoxing his opponents, he simply could not apply that to Grant.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Speaking of Vicksburg, do you think that Grant made the right decision in attempting to assault Vicksburg on May 22, 1863? For what it's worth, after the Forum's trip to Vicksburg last March, I think that he would have been negligent not to do so, given the Confederate morale break at the Big Black.

A. (John Simon): In later years, Grant expressed some regret about the 2nd assault on Vicksburg, the May 22 assault. It's true that he wanted to probe the Confederate defenses again, and he was lured into committing more troops on the basis of a report from General McClernand, which was probably the beginning of the end for McClernand. On the other hand, Grant is, as his wife pointed out, "an obstinate man." And I think that assault was unfortunate. Grant thought it was unfortunate, and I can't believe that he had a reasonable chance at that point of breaking through the Confederate lines.

Q. (Civil War Forum): What should me make of Sylvanus Cadwallader's account of Grant's celebrated two-day bender? Catton was skeptical of Cadwallader's allegations, mostly because he found no contemporary documentary evidence for it. Do you think Cadwallader was embellishing the incident or not?

A. (John Simon): Cadwallader has always been a problem—he wrote his account long after the events that he purported to describe, and he put himself in the middle of the action. He was a fervent admirer of Grant's staff officer John Rawlins, and named his son Rawlins Cadwallader. Rawlins had made a practice during the Civil War of dramatizing his role in keeping Grant from drinking. Rawlins was, in fact, an ardent teetotaler, and always acted as if his presence at headquarters kept Grant from drinking. There's no evidence that Grant drank when Rawlins wasn't there. As for the Cadwallader account, there is reason to believe that he was not even on that boat which took Grant to Satartia. Ever since the publication of Cadwallader's account in 1955, people have found that story too good to resist, and I understand that it furnishes the centerpiece of novels published in the year 2000. It's not taken seriously in the Grant field.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Publicly, Grant was usually complimentary of George Meade. Does Grant's private correspondence reveal a different opinion? Did Grant find their relationship (having his Headquarters with the Army of the Potomac) awkward?

A. (John Simon): That's an excellent question. It's a terrible relationship. Grant tried to do something which simply could not be done—that is, he intended to accompany the Army of the Potomac during the spring campaign of 1864,leaving Meade in command of the AoP, and justifying his own presence on the basis of attaching the 9th Corps under Burnside, who technically ranked Meade. For that matter, Ben Butler claimed to rank Meade, but Grant ranked everybody, and he saw his role primarily as one of coordinator. But he knew what he wanted Meade's army to do, and somehow Meade disappointed him during the campaign. Although there was a great deal of expressed admiration for Meade, Grant was gradually taking control.
By the summer of 1864, Meade requested an assignment to command elsewhere, and by the end of the war, Grant had really seized the reins and in that final campaign, beginning at the end of March, and carrying through to Appomattox, Meade was virtually ignored. Grant knew no other way to end the war except to drive those armies as hard only he could drive them, and he used Sheridan, who had quarreled bitterly with Meade early in the Overland Campaign, as effectively as possible. By the end of the war, Meade is a fairly pathetic figure. He'd been neglected by the newspaper correspondents—because of his treatment of a reporter, there was a universal desire on the part of other correspondents to minimize his role in the final operations of the war—and Meade left the war a disappointed and bitter man, a bitterness that overwhelmed him especially when Sheridan was promoted over him. In some respects, Meade may have died of a broken heart and could be counted as one of the casualties of the Civil War.

Q. (Civil War Forum): You referred to Meade's treatment of a reporter as having put him in a negative spot with the rest of the Civil War correspondents. I'm unfamiliar with this story. Would you please elaborate? Thanks.

A. (John Simon): Well, the reporter in question had written a story suggesting that after the Battle of the Wilderness Meade had wanted to withdraw to Washington, which was not only untrue, but it touched Meade on a sore point. That is, he'd already been accused of being reluctant at Gettysburg, and he exploded—he treated the reporter, whose name was Crapsey by the way, sometimes given as Cropsey, because people couldn't believe that anyone would have such an ugly name, cruelly by having him paraded through camp wearing a sign declaring him a libeler, and then expelled from the Union lines. As it turned out, Crapsey was related to one of Grant's oldest and dearest friends, but it was essentially Meade's overreaction to a newspaper story that led to his punishment by the Press.

Q. (Civil War Forum): We appreciated your participation in the American Presidents series on CSPAN. That was an excellent show.

A. (John Simon): Thank you. There are no sweeter words in the English language than "I saw you on television."

Civil War Sacrilege

One of the most controversial Civil War books of the past 15 years is a thoughtful 1991 treatise on Robert E. Lee by the Indianapolis attorney, Alan Nolan. Controversial in that it caused many of the best historians of our time to choose sides on its merits. There did not seem to be much middle ground in the discussions, which ranged from the notion that it was about time someone built upon the iconoclasm of Connelly’s Marble Man, to furious denunciations of Nolan for perpetrating a hit job.

Me? I thought it was pretty fascinating. Back on February 13, 1997, I invited the then 74-year-old Nolan to field questions about his book in CompuServe’s Civil War Forum. Here are some of the questions and answers from that day regarding The University of North Carolina Press’s, Lee Considered: Robert E. Lee and Civil War History.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Few titles have generated as much discussion and controversy in Civil War circles as your Lee Considered -- Civil War enthusiasts of every stripe are still critiquing your work, and prominent historians have weighed in on both sides of the matter. All of this confirms one reviewer’s conclusion that it is a book which "cannot be ignored." How has the response to the book been from your perspective, from reviews, and from engaging the public at speaking events?

A. (Alan Nolan): The response has been extremely gratifying. I frankly did not start out to write a book to shock or provoke, but it turned out that it did shock or provoke. It had extremely good sales, it was a main selection of the History Book Club—which is of course is advantageous to a book—and the review treatment of it was very interesting to me. It certainly had mixed reviews. There were some reviewers who, by God, did not like it. But it got a good many favorable reviews in the useful media, such as the New York Times, New Republic, American Heritage, and a number of academic publications, and one of the things that interested me was that there were many favorable reviews in the South. There were some unfavorable reviews in the South by old-line neo-Confederate writers—the Freeman school—but a lot of the young Southern historians liked it. And I thought the review treatment of the book, all in all, was extremely favorable. 

If you add it up and weigh it all based on reviews, it was favorably received. And I could tell from Round Table invitations that there was a lot of interest on the grass roots level, among Civil War buffs. It's just gone into paperback, and there's also a 3rd printing in hard back. The press doing the paperback is hopeful that it will be adopted by college professors teaching Civil War history, and I know Gary Gallagher at Penn State has included it on his reading lists for Civil War classes.

All in all it's been a good experience. If I've hurt anybody's feelings, I'm sorry, and I know I have . . . but I also think it's historic, and the people whose feelings are hurt are romantic. I belong to the non-romantic school about the Civil War. I think of it as sort of the American holocaust, and the idea that it was somehow glorious, or that leaders like Lee were somehow glorious, seems to me to be mythological.

Q. (Civil War Forum): I think you neatly dispel some commonly-held conceptions about Lee, such as the idea that he was offered command of all Union armies by Winfield Scott. Perhaps the most provocative section of Lee Considered, however, endeavors to show that Lee continued fighting the war long after he knew it was pointless. Could you summarize that argument for us here, and what you based it upon?

A. (Alan Nolan): Yes, I can summarize that. Lee—and I quote this in the book—in a letter to Jefferson Davis on June 10th, 1863 (it's in the Official Records) expresses deep pessimism about the future of the war. That's before Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and surely he must have realized the significance of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. He had said a number of times that if his army was ever besieged, it was only a matter of time before they'd have to surrender, and he found himself besieged at Petersburg in June of 64. His official letters during the early weeks and months of the siege of Petersburg were extremely pessimistic, almost desperate, so I think that he knew at least 10 months before Appomattox that there was no way that his army was going to survive—he was going to have to surrender it.

And then of course in September of 1864 he wrote a letter that said he thought it was going to be impossible to keep Grant out of Richmond. And in November 1864 is Lincoln's reelection, and I think that everyone knew in November, 5 months before Appomattox, that the ball game was over. There wasn't even a miracle left. And he kept on going, had huge casualties in those months—the killed and wounded in the Appomattox campaign itself were 6200 people, in addition, of course, to thousands of captured. That book [Lee Considered] as a whole is a response to the deification mythology about Lee, and one of the things he has been glorified about is his dogged pursuit of the war. 

My point, based on the analysis I've given here, is that that is not glorious. I'm more concerned with the common soldier in his army, and the union army, who were killed after he knew it was over. If you believe that Lee did the right thing when he surrendered at Appomattox, for the reasons he stated, which was to avoid the useless slaughter of his men, then inevitably you have to ask if there was an earlier time when slaughter became useless, and I think the answer is yes. So he deserves to be criticized for that. I think he clearly had the authority to surrender his army at any time that he thought that it was hopeless. He thought that at Appomattox, but he also thought that at least five months earlier than that.

Q. (Civil War Forum): As you did your research, what surprised you the most about Lee, in comparison to the mental image you had of him before you began?

A. (Alan Nolan): I think that I hadn't realized how sort of Rholier than thouS he was. It seemed to me that he was enormously self-serving, always giving himself credit for what he termed his "honor." I didn't realized he was such a psalm- singer about himself. I also didn't realize how strong a believer, or advocate of slavery he was.

Q. (Civil War Forum): You speak of unfavorable reviews from neo-Confederate Southerners, but objection to your book as an attack on Lee comes from others too. How do you account for the power of the Lee mythology among people who do not have a historical or genealogical tie to the Confederacy, and whose political opinions are reasonably mainstream today?

A. (Alan Nolan): Well I think we've been bathed throughout my life, and I'm 74, with the sainthood of General Lee. It's something you're taught in school as a kid, and a lot of people have accepted that. That's why I named my book Lee Considered, instead of Reconsidered, because I don't think most people had considered the truth of such stories about his opposition to slavery, his seceding was an honorable thing, that he was such a magnanimous man. I think the people who accepted the myth of Lee are the ones who have the greatest admiration for him. And I respect those people, but I think they're mistaken. I disagree with them.

Q. (Civil War Forum): With regard to the point you raised about Lee's failure to surrender earlier, do you think Lee felt he had the authority to take such a momentous decision, given that the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia would have effectively finished the Confederacy? Could we not equally say his perseverance was a tribute to a belief in the supremacy of his political masters in such decisions?

A. (Alan Nolan): That is one of the defenses, and I addressed that specifically. Lee definitely did believe in civilian political supremacy. On the other hand, when he did surrender, he did so without authority. He simply advised Davis after the fact. There's an appendix in my book discussing his authority. As a matter of military law, he had the right to surrender his army without express authority of his government, and in point of fact, that's exactly what he did.

Q. (Civil War Forum): We've been studying Antietam here, and debating Lee as a tactician. Do you have any opinions on his overall qualities as a field commander, whether any of his genius was luck or the decision of others or whether the myth is operating in this area too?

A. (Alan Nolan): I think Lee was a very successful tactician, a very successful combat general, Antietam being one of his finest hours in that respect. I fault Lee as a soldier because I don't think he understood the grand strategy of the war.

Q. (Civil War Forum): You mention both Thomas Connelly's The Marble Man and William Garrett Piston's Ph.D. thesis and the book that came from it, Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant, in your book. What impact did these "heretical" works have on you in evaluating the Lee hagiography?

A. (Alan Nolan): Well, they made me feel that in reacting against the hagiography, that I wasn't alone in the world, or entirely crazy. As I mention in the introduction, Connelly wrote a book critical of Lee, and lived, and that was reassuring to me. But in terms of their ideas, they weren't necessarily the same as mine.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Given the limitations you've identified in Lee's character, how do you account for his enduring popularity with all ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia? Was this based solely on his ability to deliver victory, or is it another misconception?

A. (Alan Nolan): I think Lee, after the war, was sort of canonized by the South in the South's effort to come out of the war with something. Lee was built up by Jubal Early systematically, and by the public at large not systematically. And when you create a hero, amongst the whole lost cause myth, I think that the soldiers who had fought for that man are themselves dignified the more dignity he is accorded, so they go along with it. Napoleon is still a military hero in France, even though he was ultimately defeated, and his casualties, like Lee's, were horrendous. But he has been glorified in French history.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Was post-war Lee the apolitical figure, preaching reconciliation and forgiveness, that he is usually portrayed?

A. (Alan Nolan): My answer to that is no. He certainly on occasion could be very conciliatory, but his ordinary position was that of a defeated Southerner. He was very resentful of the North. He was very resentful of black people. He felt that the South should be readmitted to the Union with no conditions, and no delay—he wanted the U.S. to act as if the war had not taken place, 600,000 dead people were neither here nor there. He was a classic southern partisan after the war.

Q. (Civil War Forum): Jim McPherson in Drawn with the Sword refers to Civil War buffs as being relatively uninterested in history and more interested in the war almost as a grand sporting event or game. I know you're on the spot, but what do you think of buffs, Round Tables, reenactors, forum members, etc.?

A. (Alan Nolan): Well, I'm interested in Civil War history in all ways, and I take seriously anybody who shares that interest, even if their particular activity may or may not be one I personally engage in. I do think that most Civil War buffs are unusually interested in the blood and guts, battles and leaders, more interested in that side of it than the many other facets of it—the political and social history of the war is not as interesting to the typical buff as is the warfare.

The Free State of Jones: MISSISSIPPI'S LONGEST CIVIL WAR

revisiting a favorite book

A Q&A with Victoria Bynum

The saga of Jones County during the Civil War is one of the most intriguing and enduring sidebars of the era. Here, from the archives of the Civil War Forum, is the transcript of a Q&A with Dr. Bynum, professor of history at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, about her book, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). This conversation took place on-line, October 25, 2001.

Q. (David Woodbury): Welcome Dr. Bynum. Since this is probably a fairly obscure topic even among Civil War buffs, can you begin with an overview of Jones County, and what set it apart from the rest of Mississippi (e.g., the paucity of slaves there), and the events that gave rise to stories of the so-called "Free State," or Kingdom of Jones?

A. (Dr. Bynum): Jones County was founded in 1826, and it's part of one of the earlier-settled sections of Mississippi (because of Native Americans already being pushed out of that part of the state, but not out of the more fertile portions of Mississippi). Many of the earliest settlers were veterans of the War of 1812, especially. I won't go too much into it, but because it was the Piney Woods region, you didn't have a great many slaveholders there. Slavery was important—there were slaveholders—but not many big slaveholders. It had the lowest number of slaveholders of any county in the state, and almost 80 percent of those slaveholders owned fewer than four slaves.

So, just to leap forward to the Civil War itself, this was a region that was pretty ripe—by around 1862—for seeing the war as a "rich man's war" and "poor man's fight," because they were the poorest men in the state. I don't want to imply that they were landless, because they were small landowners, but in terms of slaveholders, they were the poorest in the state. [The county] voted almost 2-1 against secession.

Moving ahead to the 20th century about how all these stories got started—what made this story so legendary and why it has persisted so long is that the leader of this band of deserters crossed the color line. Now, it's not that crossing the color line was so unusual, it's the way that Newton Knight did it. He not only crossed the line, but two of his children intermarried with the children of the slave woman who was his chief collaborator (it was after the war that they intermarried—she was his collaborator during the war). And that resulted in a mixed-race community that's still very vibrant today—a very large mixed-race community that claims descent from Rachel the slave, and Newton, the leader of the deserter band.

. . . So you've had this ongoing battle—this is why I make the second part of the title, "Mississippi's Longest Civil War," because factions of this family have been debating the meaning of this uprising since the Civil War. And with the racial aspect, it has made the debate particularly volatile. Those who wanted to defend the Unionism of the Knight band generally just erased the story of the race-mixing, and those who were pro-Confederate . . . used the racial mixing as just further examples that these were deviant men who committed treason against the country, against the Confederacy, and against their race. That's why the story has lasted, [and] because there have been several books written, and a novel, and even a movie made from the novel.

Q. (David Woodbury): One of the fun things about reading your book is the spirit of investigation, or discovery, in unmasking the past. Can you recall any major breakthroughs during the course of your research, or any particular surprises you encountered upon digging deeper?

A. (Dr. Bynum): I believe some of the most delightful surprises were the ongoing discoveries I made about the Collins family—I believe that their story is one that was buried because of the notoriety of Newt Knight. The discovery that their ancestors were both Regulators back in the 1760s and Populists in the 1890s kind of gave me a whole view of Southern descent as represented by this family, in a way that just stood right out—and made them the core of the Unionist group there, rather than Newt Knight.

And I want to add that probably the biggest surprise was that the Collins' had brothers in Texas who were leaders of their own deserter band, so there were actually two deserter bands which existed simultaneously. It just showed the uncompromising nature of their Unionism, but not nearly all the deserters were as Unionist as the Collins. There was a core group of about five different families that I would call truly Unionist. Putting that together was very exciting, because I kept finding connections between the very distant past, and the Civil War era, and connections between the various families as well.

Q. (Margaret D. Blough): What was the reaction of the Confederate authorities? Was it as brutal as the suppression of the earlier East Tennessee Unionist uprising?

A. (Victoria Bynum): I'm not sure just how brutal that was, in terms of making an exact comparison, but the Confederacy did send two expeditions into Jones County to put down the uprisings there, and in the Official Records there is quite a bit of discussion of Jones County. The most important example is Colonel Lowry's raid on Jones County. In the space of a few days, they executed ten members of the Knight Company—the Knight Band. That was the worst experience that the Jones County group experienced. I imagine that it was probably worse in East Tennessee due to the geographic location. Jones County was still pretty remote, and there weren't as many raids.

Q. (Stevan F. Meserve): My question is about Unionist sentiment in Jones County. How many precincts of the county voted to remain in the Union? Here in Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, three of 16 precincts voted to remain in the Union. Overall, the county voted 2:1 to secede.

A. (Victoria Bynum): All I know—that I've been able to find—is that 166 people voted against secession, and I believe it was about 89 who voted for it . . . Let's see . . . Yes, 166 for the Cooperationist Candidate, and 89 for the Secessionist Candidate. In fact, neighboring Perry county (I don't have those numbers with me) was even more Unionist. So Jones County was not isolated in that respect. The Perry County delegate held out longer.

Q. (Margaret D. Blough): Did any of the Jones County Unionists articulate why they supported the Union? The pressure must have been intense in the Deep South for secession?

A. (Victoria Bynum): Yes, of course in their county they didn't feel that so directly—more so when the war began—but (after the war) they cited the 20 Negro Law [when] citing reasons for their desertion from the Confederacy. The only articulated Unionist statements are by the Collins family, who did not believe that the election of Abraham Lincoln was grounds for secession. And there's a quote of a certain Collins brother counseling men to try to get duty in the hospitals as nurses if they did join the service -- that they should not fight against the Union. And one more statement attributed to the Collins' is that while they didn't believe in slavery, they also did not believe that the federal government had the right to end it.

Q. (Teresa N. Blaurock): Early in the book, you describe rivers that were dammed to provide power for mills, but preventing fishing for those needing to do that. It seems such a conflict! I know the Jones County deserters were really against the 20 Negro Law, which was the objection to "government" in their era.

A. (Victoria Bynum): One of the things that I found, as you no doubt noticed, were that these were people who were very touchy about the government's role in their lives. And again to use the Collins' as an example, since they were always in the thick of it—as they moved across the frontier they continued petitioning the government to respect their rights as citizens and to provide them protection, not only against Indians, but against corrupt local officials. So this is a theme that runs throughout their history, and I think that's the point that you're making with your comment.

Q. (David Woodbury): It sounds like your research benefited nearly as much from elderly locals and descendants as it did from archival work. That is, they were able to show you things, like the grave sites of Newt and Rachel Knight. Could you have written this book 20 or 30 years from now, after many of these people are gone?

A. (Victoria Bynum): I agree that my personal contacts with descendants was really crucial to the book, and no I couldn't have written the same book. I could have written a book—a study—but in fact when I started writing this book I had no idea that I would achieve the kind of contact with local people that I did. It brought perspectives that I just don't think I could have pieced together from archival documents. In particular, I don't think I could have described the mixed race community if I hadn't spent a lot of time among the descendants of Rachel and Newton Knight. . . And I don't believe I could have written nearly the kind of study of their community without that personal contact. That was crucial.

Q. (Margaret D. Blough): To tie into what Terry asked, I've seen some opinions that many of the Unionists areas in North Carolina, etc., in the mountains had had no experience with the US government, except for the postal system and the first experience they had with an intrusive government was Confederate authorities enforcing the conscription and impressment laws? Is that what you saw?

A. (Victoria Bynum): I would say that in general that was true, once they settled in Jones county, that they had a lot of local autonomy. Some writers suggest there was no real government in Jones county before the war, but that just isn't true. But it is fair to say that they had very limited contact with state government at the top, or federal government. However, I would still point out that their frontier petitions do show quite an interest in the Federal government and its power. They have a long history of protest of corrupt local government, and I suspect that during the Civil War they developed a similar relationship with the Federal government, because they saw the Confederacy as another example of corrupt local government. That tradition goes all the way back to the Regulators.

Q. (David Woodbury): You include a photograph of the Leaf River in your book, "site of Deserter's Den—the Knight Company's Civil War hideout." Were you able to pinpoint the actual location, and what is there today (presumably private property)?

A. (Victoria Bynum): It is private property today. I took the photo myself and I was taken there by one of those local old-timers. Not very far from that river—the site of that river in the photograph—is the cemetery of Newton Knight's grandfather. That land is now in the hands of a private company, and we had to be escorted into the cemetery by someone who had a key... But all of those lands used to be owned by the core members of the deserter band.

Q. (Stevan F. Meserve): On the subject of "intrusive" government, how much intrusion did Jones County see during the war from officials on either side? The territory between Hattiesburg and Meridian was pretty much no man's land, wasn't it?

A. (Victoria Bynum): I think it was pretty much considered no-man's land between those areas. The Confederacy managed to have a Home Guard unit down in Jones County, headed by a local Confederate officer, and that was Amos McLemore, reputed to have been murdered by Newt Knight and his men. By April of 1864, when more and more reports were reaching Confederate officials elsewhere that Jones County was under the control of deserters, and they had murdered some of the tax agents, then they sent the two expeditions I mentioned earlier... Col. Maury, in March (1864), subdued the deserters a bit but they came back just as strong, so then they sent Col. Robert Lowry in April. Now that really did splinter the band. He executed ten of them, and that's when a number of them fled to New Orleans and joined the Union army. About 40—they weren't all members of the band—about 40 Jones County men joined the Union Army in New Orleans... And then about 15 men were captured and forced back into the Confederate army. That left about 20 more whom they never caught, including Newt Knight, still out in the swamps.

Q. (Teresa N. Blaurock): You describe the prominent role of women in the book. Using "polecat musk and red pepper" to throw off the scent of the men from the dogs was rather emphatic. How did that come to be known as the thing to use?

A. (Victoria Bynum): Well, according to Ethel Knight, who wrote the best known book (The Echo of the Black Horn), the white women learned it from Rachel, the slave. I don't know where she got her information from.

Q. (David Woodbury): When did you first hear of the legend about Jones County in the Civil War? And what first drew you to this as a subject of scholarly research?

A. (Victoria Bynum): I first learned about Jones County around 1976 when I was an undergraduate in college. I saw it in a footnote in the Randall and Donald—the old Civil War text [Randall, James G., and David H. Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction]. I did not hear about it from within my own family, even though my father was born in Jones County. What drew me to it as a subject of scholarship was writing my first book, Unruly Women. I have two chapters on the Civil War there, and one of those chapters centers on a county very similar to Jones County in many ways, and that's Montgomery County, North Carolina. . . .But I just became fascinated with the topic of Southern Unionism, and the way that entire families were involved in resisting the Confederacy. It was both the class element in it, and the participation of women and free blacks in North Carolina that made me then want to look at Jones County. So, it was only as I developed as a historian myself that I decided I would like to do a study of Jones County.

Q. (David Woodbury): Would you talk a little bit about the so-called "white Negro" community in Jones County after the war, the trial of Davis Knight in the 1940s, and why this is such an important part of the story of The Free State of Jones.

A. (Victoria Bynum): I think it's incredibly important because it reveals how 20th century race relations and segregation buried the story of the Free State of Jones beneath all these stereotypes about race-mixing, and then combined with the myth of the Lost Cause, which presented Unionists as treasonous. The story had just become so distorted. And so I began and ended the book with the trial to basically look at why race was such a volatile part of the story, and then to move from there to look at the story of a class-based uprising of white men that is an important story in its own right, and would not have been buried so deeply if it had not been for the obsession with Newton Knight's interracial relationship with Rachel. And so I was determined to tell both stories, and particularly to try to bring back the stories of all these other members of Knight's band who had just sort of been lost from the picture.

Some years back, in 1066, William the Conqueror defeated the British at the Battle of Hastings.

Today, nine-hundred and forty-one years later, visitors can still see some of the actual battlefield, and visit the ruins of Battle Abbey. One English Heritage site invites you and me to "enjoy the new audio tour of the 100-acre battlefield, stand on the very spot where King Harold was slain and explore the ruins of the atmospheric abbey, built by William the Conquer to commemorate the thousands who died."

By contrast, probably the most dramatic surviving remnants of the nearly 144-year-old fighting around Atlanta in the American Civil War are a handful of partial "Shoupades," innovative earthworks designed by Francis Shoup as part of Joe Johnston's Chattahoochee River Line—now fenced-in mounds practically in the side yards of massive, cookie-cutter suburban homes.


The Battle of Peachtree Creek, the Battle of Atlanta, Utoy, Ezra Church, Jonesboro—all were critical battles in a critical campaign in the war that ultimately determined the future of the nation. But one gets the distinct feeling that there's more battlefield to see at Hastings than there is in Atlanta. And but for groups like the Georgia Battlefields Association, there would be even less.

Spending a day visiting Civil War sites in Atlanta is an exercise in imagination. One must imagine battlefields where townhouses, factories, golf courses, and shopping centers now stand. Of course that is true of many other areas in the country, but few cities have been more diligent and comprehensive in their destruction of all-things-Civil War than has the city of Atlanta. Here are a few photos of our visit. Charlie Crawford, President of the GBA, led the way, starting off with the visit to some surviving Shoupades [click on images to enlarge].




These remaining photos will give you a good feel for what I'm speaking of. The death sites of Generals Walker and McPherson in the Battle of Atlanta are in a busy intersection (Walker) and a residential area (McPherson). The headquarters marker where Johnston handed over command to John Bell Hood is in an industrial parking lot. The Andrews marker is on a downtown street corner. The last image is of the Texas, situated in the Atlanta Cyclorama, the locomotive that went in pursuit of Andrews Raiders.