Guarding Prisoners During the Gettysburg Campaign

   The June 1863 battle of Winchester was a resounding Confederate victory and a good start to the Gettysburg campaign. Confederate forces under Richard Ewell were assigned the job of capturing or pushing out the 6,900 Federals garrisoning in and around Winchester, Virginia. The Federal force was under the command of Gen. Robert Milroy. One historian writes that the Federal soldiers, largely from Ohio and West Virginia, “had done little since their enlistments but guard duty on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and their fortifications were badly suited to resist a determined attack.”[1] 

Richard Ewell 

   Milroy believed that the gathering Confederate forces south of him were merely staging for a cavalry raid. When news arrived that a large Confederate force had near by, it was really too late to escape. The Confederates broke through the outer defenses on the evening of June 14, and Milroy ordered a retreat that began at 2:00 am the next morning. Four miles from Winchester, Milroy ran into Confederate forces at Stephenson’s Depot. It was an “ambush cleverly laid by Ewell.”[2] Leading the ambush were the three brigades under Allegheny Johnson. After three failed attempts to break through the Confederate lines, Milroy ordered his regiments  to each “leave to look out for itself, and what had once been Milroy’s command broke up in desperately fleeing fragments.”[3]

   Based upon returns from the Federal regiment, the loses were approximately 3,856 captured, although it is unclear just who was captured in Winchester and who was captured at Stephenson’s Depot. The heaviest-hit were the 67^th Pennsylvania Infantry, losing 714 men, the 18^th Connecticut, with 513 men captured, and the 123^rd Ohio, losing 445 men captured.[4]

   Following the battle, the prisoners were marched to the recently captured Federal forts. It would take several days to move all of the prisoners to Richmond. On June 16, captured Federals began to make the trip to Richmond. They, with their guards, would travel over 200 miles, part of it on foot, and part via rails. The 58^th Virginia and the 54^th North Carolina were assigned the task of escorting the prisoners. Colonel Francis H. Board, 58^th Virginia, addressed the guards: “Men, these Yankees have fallen into our hands by the fortune of war. I want them treated like gentlemen. If I hear of any insults or abuse, it will be punished.” The men would walk from Winchester to Staunton, where they boarded the cars to Richmond. According to one Federal, it took six days, from June 18 to June 24, to reach Staunton.[5]

   The Federals often had harsh words about their captors and the citizens they met. The chaplain of the 12^th Pennsylvania Cavalry complained that turnpike seemed to burn and blister his feet. “Half-clad, many shoeless and hatless and unfed, the cavalcade was a sorrowful one. The sufferings of the trip I cannot express. Nothing to eat but what we begged or bought off citizens who hated us intensely, shut their doors in our face, and from appearances would have been far better pleased with a visit from even his Satanic majesty himself. Indeed, unless the guard had [not] interfered in our behalf, we should have fared very badly.”[6] A captain in the 123^rd Ohio was even harsher, writing that during the march to Staunton, “we were necessitated, by our unfortunate condition as prisoners of war, to submit to the most contemptible treatment, and outrageous insults, that an enraged and diabolical enemy could heap upon us. This detestable treatment was not confined, neither was it most rampant among the soldier guards; but the citizens outrivaled even the soldiers in the exhibition of hate and virulence. They seemed to take great intense delight in hurling their anathemas upon us with unmitigated fury, such as ‘d----d Yankees,’ Milroy’s thieves and robbers,’ ‘black abolitionists,’ ‘every one of you, out to be hung,’ &c. &c.” Of course, some vitriol might be expected. But at one point, the colonel of the 58^th Virginia asked if their were any musicians among the Federals captives. When the answer was yes, he ordered them to the front, provided them with a fife and drum, and allowed them to play what ever airs they wanted, which included “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star Spangled Banner.”[7]

   David Parker, 54^th North Carolina, was one of those detailed to guard the prisoners. He wrote home that his column contained 2,200 Federal prisoners. “We had to march ninety two miles by land to Stanton. It took us five days. . . I tell you that we have had a hard time getting them here [Richmond]. We scarcely got to sleep any on the road. We had to stand guard two hours and only sleep two hours through the night and then march hard the next day.” On arriving in Staunton, the prisoners were placed in the cars, fifty per car. The guards were likewise divided up. Parker was assigned to continue the trip on to Richmond. “They then detailed twenty eight out of our regt to guard seven hundred of them to Richmond. We left Staunton a Tuesday evening about half an hour by sun and landed here the next evening.”[8] The Federal officers were sent to Libby Prison, while the enlisted men were sent to first to Castle Thunder, and then to Belle Island.

   The almost 4,000 men captured during the second battle of Winchester are not often counted as Confederates captured during the Gettysburg campaign. As Gettysburg concluded, General Lee placed “several thousand” Federal prisoners in charge of Maj. Gen. George Pickett, with orders to escort these men back to Virginia.[9] Kent Masterson Brown places the number at 4,000.[10] Stephen Sears places the number at 3,800.[11] If coupled with the 1,300 that Lee had paroled, and the couple of hundred that JEB Stuart had captured and paroled, the number of Federal soldiers captured during the Gettysburg  campaign probably came close to 10,000.

   If you are interested in this part of the Gettysburg Campaign, let me highly recommend The Second
Battle of Winchester: The Confederate Victory that Opened the Door to Gettysburg (Savas Beatie, 2016) by Eric J. Wittenberg and Scot L. Mingus, Jr. It is a fantastic book at this overlooked part of the history of the war.

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[1] Guelzo, Gettysburg, 60.

[2] Coddington, Gettysburg, 89.

[3] Guelzo, Gettysburg, 62.

[4] ORs, Vol. 27, pt.  2, 53.

[5] Wittenburg and Mingus, The Second Battle of Winchester, 379.

[6] Wittenburg and Mingus, The Second Battle of Winchester, 385.

[7] Wittenburg and Mingus, The Second Battle of Winchester, 382-383.

[8] Henry, Pen in Hand, 91.

[9] Hess, Pickett’s Charge, 354.

[10] Brown, Retreat from Gettysburg, 177.

[11] Sears, Gettysburg, 479.

Site Visit Saturday: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ashwood, TN

 

Patrick Cleburne 

  Churches occupy important places in our society. Many of them, and the grounds that surround them, are packed full of history. (You can check out a previous post on churches in the crossfire of the war here). One of those churches full of history is St. John’s Episcopal Church, just outside of Columbia, Tennessee.

   St. John’s was consecrated in 1842 by the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee, James Hervey Otey. It was built by Leonidas Polk, the Missionary Bishop of the Southwest. The land was donated by the Polk family, a part of a land grant awarded to William Polk of North Carolina. The church was constructed by the slaves from the various Polk plantations in the area, and served not only as a church, but as a school as well.

 During the war, Federal soldiers under the command of General Buell, on their way to reinforce Grant at Shiloh, forced their way into the church, wrecking the organ and removing some of the pipes. In 1864, as the Confederate army advanced towards Columbia, General Cleburne, on passing the church, reportedly told his staff “So this is the church built by General Leonidas Polk and members of his family? If I am killed in the impending battle, I request that my body be laid to rest in this, the most beautiful spot I ever beheld.” (Yeatman, “St. John’s-A Plantation of the Old South.” Tennessee Historically Quarterly, Vol. 10, No 4 (December 1951): 340) 

   Following the battle of Franklin, in which six Confederate generals were killed, three of them, Patrick Cleburne, Hiram Granbury, and Otho Strahl, along with two staff officers --Col. R. B. Young, Granbury’s chief of staff and Lt. John H. Marsh, who served with Strahl--were buried in the “potter’s field” section of Rose Hill Cemetery in Columbia, Tennessee. Hearing of this, Brig. Gen. Lucius E. Polk, with the help of Confederate chaplain Charles Quintard, had the five exhumed and reburied at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Many decades after the war, the three generals were again exhumed and reburied in other cemeteries. Cleburne was reburied in Helena, Arkansas; Strahl was reburied in Dyersburg, Tennessee; and Granbury was reinterred in Granbury, Texas.  Young and Marsh are still interred at St. Johns.

   There are other Confederate graves here as well, including Col. Robert F. Beckham, chief of artillery for Stephen D. Lee’s Corps. He was mortally wounded at Columbia, Tennessee on November 29, 1864. Brigadier General Lucius E. Polk, who was a nephew of Leonidas Polk, is interred at St. John’s, as is George Campbell Brown, who served on the staff of Richard Ewell in the Army of Northern Virginia, and James H. Thomas, a Tennessee delegate to the Confederate Provisional Congress. Mary Martin Pillow, the wife of General Gideon J. Pillow, is also buried at St. John’s. The form for the Ashwood Rural Historic District, for the National Register of Historic Places, states that there is a Confederate section with the dead from the battle of Ashwood behind the church.

   Carroll Van West, in her book Tennessee’s Historic Landscapes, considers St. John’s a “magnificent achievement in rural Gothic Revival architecture.” (368)  The church is no longer in use, save for one Sunday a year. But the building itself and the surrounding grounds are kept in immaculate condition. St. John’s is the oldest surviving church building in Maury County.

   My first and only visit came in May 2021.

Confederate Leadership in Flux

   The soldiers called it the Virginia Quick Step or the Tennessee Trots. It would be unlikely to find some Confederate soldier who did not suffer some complaint of dysentery or diarrhea throughout the war. At Chimbarazo Hospital in Richmond, there were 10,503 cases treated there throughout the war, or, one sixth of all admissions. For one out of ten, it was deadly.[i] What is the difference between dysentery and diarrhea?  Margaret Humphreys writes “Dysentery was diagnosed in cases with fever, bloody stools, and tenesmus, colonic and rectal cramping that caused a continuous urge to defecate. Absent the blood and cramping the case was categorized as diarrhea…”[ii]

What happens when the same maladies hit the ranks of the high command? How incapacitated were some of these generals? Finding detailed information about some of these generals is a hard task. Unless they wrote home of their conditions or were bad enough off to be relieved of command, we really don’t know. But there are a few cases. Brigadier General Lawrence O’Bryan Branch wrote home of suffering from dysentery from June through at least early August 1862. During the days leading up to the battle of Cedar Mountain, Branch was being hauled around in an ambulance. Only as his brigade was called upon to go and stabilize Jackson’s left did Branch drag himself out to take command. Bull Paxton, commanding the old Stonewall brigade, wrote home in January 1863 that he was unwell, and had been since August the proceeding year.[iii] E. Porter Alexander suffered through the summer and fall, and doctored himself with a mixture of chloroform, brandy peppermint, and laudanum. [iv]

Bull Paxton                                   L.O. Branch

Probably the two most interesting cases concern Robert E. Lee and Richard Ewell. Of course, these two men are not your average, run-of-the-mill soldiers. From June 1862 until the end of the war, Lee commanded the principal Confederate army in the east, while Ewell was one of his top lieutenants, taking over Jackson’s corps after the death of the latter in May 1863.

Lee’s first recorded bout with dysentery came at Gettysburg. Two different officers, including W. W. Blackford of Stuart’s staff, noted that Lee was ill. Combine this with whatever heart ailment Lee had during the campaign, and we have a very sick commander. The second round was worse. On May 23, 1864, during the Overland Campaign, Lee was ill once again with “bilious dysentery.” Charles Venable, writing in 1873, lamented the opportunity that slipped away: “in the midst of these operations on the North Anna, General Lee was taken sick and confined to his tent. As he lay prostrated by his sickness, he would often repeat: ‘We must strike them a blow—we must never let them pass us again—we must strike them a blow’”.[v] We know that Lee, prostate in tent, missed a grand opportunity to wreck a portion of Grant’s army.

Richard Ewell’s case actually cost him his command, sort of. By the time of the Overland Campaign, Ewell was not performing the way Lee wished. Ewell was reported sick on May 26, and while he reported personally to General Lee at the end of the month, Lee refused to reinstate Ewell to command. The Second Corps was now under Jubal Early. Ewell protested, even meeting with Jefferson Davis, but to no avail. Ewell never regained active field command.

There are probably many other cases of dysentery or diarrhea and Confederate generals. Mild cases were something seldom mentioned in letters or official reports. Given how one case in particular changed the course of the war, maybe the “bloody flux” should be given more consideration.    

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[i] Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb, 252.

[ii] Humphrey, Marrow of Tragedy, 99.

[iii] Paxton, Letters, 72.

[iv] Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, 4

[v] Venable, “The Campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg,” 535.