Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut, April 27, 1862

New Orleans gone¹ – and with it the Confederacy. Are we not cut in two?  That Mississippi ruins us if lost. The Confederacy has been done to death by the politicians. What wonder we are lost.  Those wretched creatures of the Congress and the legislature could never rise to the greatness of the occasion.  They seem to think they were in a neighborhood squabble about precedence.

The soldiers have done their duty.

All honor to the army. Statesmen as busy as bees about their own places, or their personal honor, too busy to see the enemy at a distance. With a microscope they were examining their own interests, or their own wrongs, forgetting the interests of the people they represented. They were concocting newspaper paragraphs to injure the government. No matter how vital nothing – nothing can be kept from the enemy. They must publish themselves, night and day, what they are doing, or the omniscient Buncombe will forget them.

This fall of New Orleans means utter ruin to the private fortunes of the Prestons. Mr. Preston came from New Orleans so satisfied with Mansfield Lovell² and the tremendous steam-rams he saw there. While in New Orleans, Burnside offered Mr. Preston five hundred thousand dollars, a debt due to him from Burnside, and he refused to take it.³ He said the money was safer in Burnside's hands than his. And so it may prove, so ugly is the outlook now. Burnside is wide awake; he is not a man to be caught napping.

A son of Hilliard Judge.⁴  A little more than twenty years ago we saw Mr. and Mrs. Judge on their bridal tour.  A six-foot man has come into existence since then and grown up to this – full length, we would say.  His mother married again, is now Mrs. Brooks – wants to come and live in Columbia.

Live!  Death, not life, seems to be our fate now.

They have got Beauregard – no longer Felix, but the shiftless – in a cul-de-sac.

Mary Preston was saying she had asked the Hamptons how they relished the idea of being paupers.

“If the country is saved none of us will care for that sort of thing.”

Philosophical and patriotic,

Mr. Chesnut came in.

 ''Conrad has been telegraphed from New Orleans that the great iron-clad Louisiana went down at the first shot."

Mr. Chesnut and Mary Preston walked off, first to the bulletin-board and then to the Prestons'.

__________

¹ New Orleans had been seized by the Confederates at the outbreak of the war. Steps to capture it were soon taken by the Federals and on April 18, 1862, the mortar flotilla, under Farragut, opened fire on its protecting forts. Making little impression on them, Farragut ran boldly past the forts and destroyed the Confederate fleet, comprising 13 gunboats and two ironclads. On April 27th he took formal possession of the city.

² A civil servant in New York City before the war.  Lovell was commissioned a major general of the C. S. A. and Assigned to command New Orleans in 1861.

³ John S. Preston sold his extensive La. Sugar plantations to John Burnside, a New Orleans merchant in 1857.  These holdings helped make Burnside the greatest sugar planter in the state during the 1860’s.

⁴ Hilliard M. Judge, Sr., was a Methodist minister in Camden who died in 1857.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, p. 158-9; C. Van Woodward, Editor, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War,  p. 330-1.

Major General William T. Sherman to Ellen Ewing Sherman, April 28, 1865

IN THE FIELD, RALEIGH, April 28, 1865.

The capitulation of Johnston's army at Greensboro completes my Campaign. I leave Schofield to do the work, and have ordered the 15th and 17th, 14th and 20th corps to march to Richmond. I will go to-night to Wilmington and Charleston and Savannah to make some orders and instructions, when I will go by sea to Richmond to meet my Army. Thence it will march to Alexandria (and Washington) where I will move my headquarters to, in anticipation of mustering out the Army. It may be that while the Army is on the march from Richmond to Alexandria I can run out to Lancaster to see you all. This will be about the 15th and 20th of May, and if I could take all the family to Alexandria to witness the final scenes attending Sherman's Army it would be a [prize] in the memory to our children that would somewhat compensate for the expense and loss of time. I may be a little ahead, but think that the present volunteer army must be mustered out and a new regular army made, and the quicker the better before new complications arise.

The mass of the people south will never trouble us again. They have suffered terrifically, and I now feel disposed to befriend them — of course not the leaders and lawyers, but the armies who have fought and manifested their sincerity though misled by risking their persons. But the rascals who by falsehood and misrepresentation kept up the war, they are infamous. It will be difficult for anyone to tread a straight path amid these new complications, but I will do my best.

I perceive the politicians are determined to drive the confederates into guerilla bands, a thing more to be feared than open organized war. They may fight it out. I won't. We could settle the war in three weeks by giving shape to the present disordered elements, but they may play out their game.

SOURCES: M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Editor, Home Letters of General Sherman, p. 349-50.  A full copy of this letter can be found in the William T Sherman Family papers (SHR), University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA), Notre Dame, IN 46556, Folder CSHR 2/23 

Major General William T. Sherman to Ellen Ewing Sherman, April 23, 1863

CAMP BEFORE VICKSBURG, April 23, 1863.

Last night another batch of transports were prepared to run Vicksburg batteries. In order to afford assistance to the unfortunate I crossed over through the submerged swamp with eight yawls, and was in the Mississippi about four miles below Vicksburg and three above Warrenton. The first boat to arrive was the Tigress, a fast side-wheel boat which was riddled with shot and repeatedly struck in the hull. She rounded to, tied to the bank and sunk a wreck; all hands saved. The next was the Empire City, also crippled but afloat, then the Cheeseman that was partially disabled, then the Anglo-Saxon and Moderator, both of which were so disabled that they drifted down stream catching the Warrenton batteries as they passed. The Horizon was the sixth and last, passed down about daylight. The Cheeseman took the Empire City in tow and went down just after day, catching thunder from the Warrenton batteries. Five of the six boats succeeded in getting by, all bound for Carthage, where they are designed to carry troops to Grand Gulf and some other point across the Mississippi. This is a desperate and terrible thing, floating by terrific batteries without the power of replying. Two men were mortally wounded and many lacerated and torn, but we could not ascertain the full extent of damage for we were trying to hurry them past the lower or Warrenton batteries before daylight. The only way to go to Carthage is by a bayou road from Milliken's Bend, and over that narrow road our army is to pass below Vicksburg, and by means of these boats pass on to the east side of the Mississippi. I look upon the whole thing as one of the most hazardous and desperate moves of this or any war. A narrow difficult road, liable by a shower to become a quagmire. A canal is being dug on whose success the coal for steamers, provisions for men and forage for animals must all be transported. McClernand's Corps has moved down. McPherson will follow, and mine comes last. I don't object to this, for I have no faith in the whole plan.

Politicians and all sorts of influences are brought to bear on Grant to do something. Hooker remains statu quo. Rosecrans is also at a deadlock, and we who are now six hundred miles [ahead] of any are being pushed to a most perilous and hazardous enterprise.

I did think our government would learn something by experience if not by reason. An order is received to-day from Washington to consolidate the old regiments. All regiments below 500, embracing all the old regiments which have been depleted by death and all sorts of causes, are to be reduced to battalions of five companies in each regiment; the colonel and major and one assistant-sergeant to be mustered out, and all the officers, sergeants and corporals of five companies to be discharged. This will soon take all my colonels, Kilby Smith, Giles Smith, and hundreds of our best captains, lieutenants and sergeants and corporals. Instead of drafting and filling up with privates, one half of the officers are to be discharged, and the privates squeezed into battalions. If the worst enemy of the United States were to devise a plan to break down our army, a better one could not be attempted. Two years have been spent in educating colonels, captains, sergeants and corporals, and now they are to be driven out of service at the very beginning of the campaign in order that governors may have a due proportion of officers for the drafted men. I do regard this as one of the fatal mistakes of this war. It is worse than a defeat. It is the absolute giving up of the chief advantage of two years' work. I don't know if you understand it, but believe you do. The order is positive and must be executed. It is now too late to help it, but I have postponed its execution for a few days to see if Grant won't suspend its operation till this move is made. All the old politician colonels have been weeded out by the progress of the war, and now that we begin to have some officers who do know something they must be discharged because the regiments have dwindled below one half the legal standard. We all know the President was empowered to do this, but took it for granted that he would fill up the ranks by a draft and leave us the services of the men who are now ready to drill and instruct them as soldiers. Last fall the same thing was done, that is new regiments were received instead of filling up the old ones, and the consequence was those new regiments have filled our hospitals and depots, and now again the same thing is to be repeated. It may be the whole war will be turned over to the negroes, and I begin to believe they will do as well as Lincoln and his advisers. I cannot imagine what Halleck is about. We have Thomas and Dana both here from Washington, no doubt impressing on Grant the necessity of achieving something brilliant. It is the same old Bull Run mania, but why should other armies be passive and ours pushed to destruction?

Prime is here and agrees with me; but we must drift on with events. We are excellent friends. Indeed, I am on the best of terms with everybody, but I avoid McClernand because I know he is envious and jealous of everybody who stands in his way. . . .  He now has the lead. Admiral Porter is there, and he is already calling “For God's sake, send down some one.” He calls for me — Grant has gone himself — went this morning. I know they have got this fleet in a tight place, Vicksburg above and Port Hudson below, and how are they to get out? One or other of the gates must be stormed and carried, or else none. I tremble for the result. Of course, it is possible to land at Grand Gulf and move inland, but I doubt the capacity of any channel at our command equal to the conveyance of the supplies for this army. This army should not all be here. The great part should be at or near Grenada moving south by land. . . .

SOURCES: M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Editor, Home Letters of General Sherman, p. 253-6.  A full copy of this letter can be found in the William T Sherman Family papers (SHR), University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA), Notre Dame, IN 46556, Folder CSHR 2/03.

Major General William T. Sherman to Ellen Ewing Sherman, January 28, 1863

CAMP NEAR VICKSBURG, January 28, 1863.

... The politician thinks results can be had by breath, but how painfully it begins to come home to the American people that the war which all have striven so hard to bring on and so few to avert is to cost us so many thousands of lives. Indeed do I wish I had been killed long since. Better that than struggle with the curses and maledictions of every woman that has a son or brother to die in any army with which I chance to be associated. Of course Sherman is responsible. Seeing so clearly into the future I do think I ought to get away. The President's placing McClernand here and the dead set to ruin me for McClernand's personal glory would afford me a good chance to slide out and escape the storm and trouble yet in reserve for us. Here we are at Vicksburg on the wrong side of the river trying to turn the Mississippi by a ditch, a pure waste of human labor. Grant has come and Prime¹ is here and they can figure it out, but the canal won't do. We must carry out the plan fixed up at Oxford. A large army must march down from Oxford to Grenada and so on to the rear of Vicksburg, and another army must be here to cooperate with the gun-boats at the right time. Had Grant been within sixty miles of Vicksburg, or Banks near, I could have broken the line of Chickasaw Bayou, but it was never dreamed by me that I could take the place alone. McClernand or Grant will not undertake it. Not a word of Banks. I doubt if he has left or can leave or has any order to leave New Orleans. Therefore here we are to sit in the mud till spring and summer and maybe another year. Soldiers will soon clamor for motion, life, anything rather than canal digging. The newspapers are after me again; I published an order they must not come along on pain of being treated as spies. I am now determined to test the question. Do they rule or the commanding general? If they rule I quit. I have ordered the arrest of one, shall try him, and if possible execute him as a spy. They publish all the data for our enemy and it was only by absolute secrecy that we could get to the Post of Arkansas without their getting ahead. They did reveal our attempt to attack Haines's Bluff. I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first. I shall notify Mr. Lincoln of this if he attempt to interfere with the sentence of any court ordered by me. If he wants an army he must conform to the well established rules of military nations and not attempt to keep up the open rules of peace. The South at the start did these things, and the result has been, they move their forces from Virginia to Mississippi and back without a breath spoken or written. . . .

__________

¹ Captain Prime of the Engineer Corps.

SOURCES: M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Editor, Home Letters of General Sherman, p. 237-9.  A full copy of this letter can be found in the William T Sherman Family papers (SHR), University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA), Notre Dame, IN 46556, Folder CSHR 1/150.

A Western Governor And Somebody's Pretty Sister

The Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune relates the following:

A clerk in one of the Departments in Washington was lately detected in the act of communicating information to the rebels and was immediately discharged.  A few day[s] after he appeared at the Secretary’s office with a letter asking his re-appointment.  This letter was from a Governor of one of the Western States.  He writes to the Secretary that the ex-clerk is an old and intimate friend of his, a good and loyal citizen, has been most unjustly dealt by, and winds up by asking it as a particular personal favor that the ex-Clerk be reinstated in his office.  And the request was immediately complied with!  Directly after an acquaintance meeting Mr. Reinstated said to him:

“Where did you get acquainted with Governor _____?”

“I never was acquainted with him – never spoke to him in my life.”

“How then did you get such a strong letter from him to the Secretary?”

“Oh I have a pretty sister who went to Alexandria the other day with the Governor.  She procured the letter for me.”

The story is well authenticated and the writer believes it is true.  But what should be the punishment of a man who would thus betray his country or what is the same in effect protect those who would betray it?

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, February 1, 1862, p. 3

The degenerate days of fraud . . .

. . . corruption, unfaithfulness to public and private trusts prolific in all descriptions of human monstrosities, have produced no worse characters than the political harpies, who watching every turn in the wheel, with the sole object of securing some advantage, fair or foul for themselves or the party to which they belong.  They give not one thought to the Country or its peril – they care not one brass farthing for our institutions.  They want the country saved but unless it can be saved upon the Douglas or some other platform, saved with or without slavery, as they have severally decreed it must be, they don’t want it saved at all.  Unless their party can use the War to get into or keep in power, and to get into office or keep there, being already in – unless they can get fat jobs and contracts for themselves and friends they can see no earthly use in having a war.  And having offices and contracts, fat takes and a good thing generally, they are in favor of nursing and keeping the war agoing as long as possible.  The Country has no more dangerous enemies, not even excepting the rebels, than these heartless, mercenary politicians by trade, who do not know what patriotism is, and whose gizzards were never surprised by a generous emotion or an honest or disinterested act, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant.  From all such politicians of whatever party or name, whether in office or out good Lord deliver us.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, February 1, 1862, p. 1

Samuel Merrill

SAMUEL MERRILL, seventh Governor of the State, was born in Oxford County in the State of Maine on the 7th of August, 1822. He received a liberal education and when a young man taught school several terms in the south and in his native State. He removed to New Hampshire where he was elected to the Legislature in 1854, serving two sessions. In 1856 he came to Iowa, locating at McGregor, where he opened a general store. In 1859 he was elected on the Republican ticket to the House of the Eighth General Assembly. When the war began in 1861, Mr. Merrill took the contract to furnish three Iowa regiments with clothing before the Government could supply them with uniforms. In 1862 he was commissioned colonel of the Twenty-first Iowa Infantry. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Black River Bridge and was so disabled that he resigned his commission. In 1867 he was nominated by the Republican State Convention for Governor and elected, serving two terms. He removed to Des Moines and, after the close of his second term, engaged in the banking business. With others he established the Citizens' National Bank. He was active in bringing about the great reunion of Iowa soldiers at Des Moines in the summer of 1870. Governor Merrill was for many years an influential trustee of Iowa College at Grinnell. He acquired great wealth in banking and railroad building and finally removed to California. The last years of his life were spent in Pasadena, where he died on the 31st of August, 1899. His funeral was held at DeSsMoines and was attended by many of the public officials and prominent men of the State.

SOURCE: Benjamin F. Gue, History of Iowa, Volume IV: Iowa Biography, p. 187-8

William M. Stone

WILLIAM M. STONE, sixth Governor of Iowa, was born in Jefferson County, New York, October 14, 1827. In 1834 his parents removed to Coshocton, Ohio, and for two seasons he drove horses on the canal and when seventeen was apprenticed to a chairmaker. At twenty-one he began to read law and in 1851 was admitted to the bar. In 1854 he emigrated to Knoxville, Iowa, and began practice. He purchased the Knoxville Journal and took editorial charge of it. Mr. Stone was a delegate to the convention which organized the Republican party and was nominated for presidential elector in the Fremont campaign of that year. He was an eloquent public speaker and won wide reputation. In April, 1857, he was elected judge of the Eleventh District. When the Civil War began he raised a company for the Third Infantry and was commissioned major of the regiment. He was taken prisoner at the Battle of Shiloh and after his release was appointed colonel of the Twenty-second Infantry. He resigned in August, 1863, having been nominated for Governor by the Republican State Convention. He at once entered upon the campaign and was elected over Colonel James M. Tuttle the Democratic candidate, by more than 38,000 majority. He was reëlected by a reduced majority and during his term his private secretary in the absence of the Governor appropriated to his own use funds belonging to various counties of the State. An investigation by the General Assembly exonerated the Governor from any knowledge of or participation in the transactions. In 1877 Governor Stone was elected to the House of the Seventeenth General Assembly. In 1888 he was chosen one of the presidential electors and upon the accession of President Harrison he was appointed Assistant Commissioner of the Land Office at Washington and later was promoted to Commissioner. Governor Stone died in Oklahoma Territory, July 18, 1893.

SOURCE: Benjamin F. Gue, History of Iowa, Volume IV: Iowa Biography, p. 253

Samuel J. Kirkwood

SAMUEL J. KIRKWOOD, fifth Governor of the State, was born in Hartford County, Maryland, December 20, 1813. He was educated in Washington, D. C., and employed in a drug store. In 1836 his father removed to Richland County, Ohio, where for several years the son assisted him in clearing a new farm in the heavy forest. He finally studied law, and in 1843 was admitted to the bar. From 1845 to 1849 he was Prosecuting Attorney and was then elected to the convention which framed the present Constitution of the State of Ohio. Up to 1854 Mr. Kirkwood was a Democrat but when that party attempted to force slavery into Kansas he became alienated and favored the free soil movement. In 1855 he removed to Iowa and purchased an interest in a mill near Iowa City. In February, 1856, he served as a delegate in the State Convention which organized the Republican party of Iowa. In the fall of that year he was elected to the State Senate from the district consisting of Iowa and Johnson counties, serving in the Sixth and Seventh General Assemblies. He won such reputation as a legislator that at the Republican State Convention in 1859 he was nominated for Governor and was elected over General A. C. Dodge the Democratic candidate by over 3,000 majority. During his two terms as Governor it devolved upon him to organize and send to the seat of war more than 60,000 citizen soldiers. How ably he met and performed the arduous duties which a great war thrust upon him is recorded in the most stirring chapters of Iowa history. He won a place with the greatest "War Governors" of the Nation. In 1866 he was elected to the United States Senate to fill a vacancy of two years. In 1875 he was again chosen Governor; but the General Assembly of 1876 elected him to the Senate for a full term of six years and he resigned the office of Governor and returned to the Senate in March, 1877. Upon the inauguration of President Garfield, Governor Kirkwood was invited to a seat in the Cabinet as Secretary of the Interior which he accepted, resigning his position in the Senate. The death of the President terminated his service in the Cabinet after thirteen months and he retired to private life. During the quarter of a century that Governor Kirkwood was almost continually in public life, he possessed the confidence and esteem of the people of Iowa in as great a degree as any citizen who ever served the State. On the 28th of September, 1892, ten years after Governor Kirkwood retired to private life, at the suggestion of Governor Sherman, more than thirty of the old associates of Governor Kirkwood in official positions living in different parts of the State, assembled at his home at Iowa City to pay their respects to the "War Governor" who was then about eighty years of age. It was a remarkable gathering of distinguished men of both political parties, after time had obliterated the bitterness of a score of partisan conflicts. All met as old friends and joined in honoring the man who had earned undying fame in the most critical period of our State and National history. Governor Kirkwood died at his home near Iowa City, September 1, 1894.

SOURCE: Benjamin F. Gue, History of Iowa, Volume IV: Iowa Biography, p. 157-8