The high feud behind Lincoln's mountain map

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.

     President Abraham Lincoln used this 1863 map to cast a vision for what became Stoneman's Raid. Pointing to East Tennessee, he told Gen. Otis Howard, "They are loyal there! They are loyal!"
     Lincoln could see that the topography was as friendly as the population. The upper Tennessee Valley was a route ready-made for an invasion of Virginia, complete with a railroad. 
     This was almost certainly the same map that Gen. George Stoneman followed. The detail and precision are remarkable, and the renderings of watersheds and ridges were vital for routing his cavalry through the mountains. 
     To see the map full-size on the Library of Congress website, click here.

     The map was drawn by Adolph Lindenkohl (1833-1904), a native of Germany who became a U.S. citizen in 1857 and served as the Army's senior draftsman from 1862 to 1864. 

     Lindenkohl credits the detail about the mountains to the surveys done by Princeton professor Arnold Guyot in 1856, 1859, and 1860. This may be the earliest map that labels Mount Guyot, Mount Mitchell and Clingman's Dome, whose names were still unsettled at the dawn of the Civil War.

Dr. Elisha Mitchell (1793-1857) and Gen. Thomas Clingman (1812-1897)

      Dr. Elisha Mitchell and his former student, Gen. Thomas Clingman, had a bitter dispute about which of them had discovered North Carolina's highest mountain. The honor was eventually accorded to Dr. Mitchell after his tragic death on the mountain in 1857 and his burial on the summit in 1858.
     On this map, however, the peak we now know as Mount Mitchell is still labeled by its former name, Black Dome. This may reflect Prof. Guyot's reluctance to take sides in the Mitchell-Clingman debate. The point Lindenkohl labeled Mount Mitchell is now known as Clingman's Peak (not to be confused with Clingman's Dome in the Smokies). Black Dome is listed at 6,707 feet, as measured by Guyot. It's remarkable that 155 years ago he missed the official elevation of 6,684 by just 23 feet. 

     In 1861, Clingman was one of the state's leading advocates for secession. He became a Confederate general who was wounded at Cold Harbor and nearly killed at Globe Station, Va. He was recuperating at Shallow Ford Plantation near Huntsville, N.C., when part of Stoneman's 1st Brigade crossed the Yadkin River nearby, April 10-11, 1865.
     The Yankees were busy preparing to attack Salisbury, or otherwise they might have captured Gen. Clingman. They did raid some of the houses around Huntsville and burned a local store. But they spared the houses, including some that stand today. Two Union troopers were shot April 10 as they tried to raid the home of a man named Greenberry Harding, and one of them, Dennis Shea, died April 22 in nearby Salem.
     Many of the town names have been changed since this map was drawn. For example, Taylorsville, Tenn., is now Mountain City, and Taylorsville, Va., is now Stuart, named after Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, who was Stoneman's counterpart in the Confederate cavalry. Both of those towns, as well as Taylorsville, N.C., were in the paths of Stoneman's troops.
     In Virginia, Cranberry Plain is now Hillsville, Jacksonville is Floyd, and Greensville is Galax. In Tennessee, Carter's Depot is now Watauga (near Johnson City). In South Carolina, Limestone Springs is now Gaffney, Pleasant Grove is Greer, Pickensville is Easley and Pickens has been relocated.
     I noticed two South Carolina communities near modern-day Liberty that are named Equality and Salubrity. I suspect the raiders might have shunned a town named Sobriety. 

NEXT: 'Tomorrow at 12 o'clock I have to die'

Cross your eyes and see the Civil War in 3D

FAIR OAKS, Va.

     One hundred and fifty years ago, our forefathers may have lacked electric lights, horseless carriages, or freed slaves, but by golly they had figured out 3D photography.
    That was one of the peripheral surprises from my research of Stoneman's Raid. 
    This double image was taken by James F. Gibson, who apprenticed under Mathew Brady. It shows Col. George Stoneman (right) seated next to Gen. Henry Naglee at Fair Oaks, Virginia, during the Peninsula campaign in 1862. 
    These almost-identical frames were snapped simultanously by side-by-side cameras, mimicking the way we see with our two eyes. If you happen to have a old-fashioned stereoscope, you can easily view it in 3D. 
     If you don't ... well, most of us have a crude stereoscope built in. Hold the image at eye level and arm's length. Cross your eyes so that your left eye is looking at the right image, and vice versa. Wait for it. Soon, the 3D image should come into focus between the two frames.
    It may help to use a larger image than I can show on this blog. Click here.
    Careful! Mama said that if you cross your eyes, your face could freeze like that. 
    And as you sit there disobeying Mama and crossing your eyes, never forget you're facing a tiny camera just above your screen. Somebody may be watching you. In fact, somebody may be watching you from 150 years in the future. 
     Give 2165 a cross-eyed wink!

UPDATE July 20, 2016: I finally figured out how to animate this image so that you don't have to cross your eyes: 

To see lots more 3D images of the Civil War, click here. Another portrait of Gen. Stoneman is posted here.

NEXT➤ Lincoln's map showed the way

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Abraham Lincoln and the Horn of Freedom

 Since the days of Daniel Boone, North Carolina's Watauga County has been a gateway to the West and a threshold of freedom. We celebrate this every summer in Boone with the venerable outdoor drama,  “Horn in the West.”
 Playwright Kermit Hunter's opening lines still thunder:

In the evening West, beyond the last mountain peak, slowly dies the sun in a sea of bronze and crimson. In its setting is the majestic assurance that tomorrow will rise, that a new day will dawn.

Always the hopes and dreams of mankind lie not in the East, but in the fiery land of the sunset. The gaze of man is westward, as if he could glimpse, somewhere beyond the great golden reaches of Eternity—as though he could hear, blowing in the distant sunset, the Horn of Freedom!

 “Horn in the West” is set in America's first great rebellion, the colonial secession from Great Britain. Unresolved issues from the Revolutionary era ultimately led to the second rebellion, the Civil War, where this blog is set.
 In the mountains of western North Carolina, you can find plenty of parallels between the 1780 campaign of British Col. Patrick Ferguson, the villain in “Horn in the West,” and the 1865 raid led by Union Gen. George Stoneman, the antagonist in the song, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Both were cavalrymen who were ordered to crush rebellions and wound up terrorizing the citizenry of the mountains. Ferguson riled the Overmountain Men with threats to “lay waste your country with fire and sword.” Stoneman blazed with the intensity of his orders from Gen. Ulysses Grant: “Leave nothing for the Rebellion to stand upon.” To this day, many up here scorn their names.
 Stoneman's Raiders and the Overmountain Men both marched out of “the fiery land of the sunset,” in this case Tennessee. The Overmountain Men defeated Ferguson in the Battle of Kings Mountain, which turned out to be the tipping point of the American Revolution. The Civil War was all but over by the time Stoneman charged onto the scene, but his raid crippled what was left of the Confederacy and may have hastened the surrender of Robert E. Lee. 
 As for the “Horn of Freedom,” there are more parallels evident in how our forefathers responded to tyranny, injustice, and exploitation, whether from King George III or King Cotton. 
 At the height of the Civil War in January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves in the rebellious states. However, there was no way for the Federal government to enforce the executive order until the rebellion was defeated. For thousands of slaves, their first jubilant steps of freedom were following in the dust of Sherman's march in 1864 or Stoneman's Raid in 1865.
 Just like the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation had to be fought for before it gained authority. Blood had to be shed, as the Bible says in the book of Hebrews. Battlefields had to be consecrated, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg.

Lincoln's superfluous signature on the 13th Amendment 

 It was 150 years ago when Lincoln took the next step. On Wednesday, February 1, 1865—while Sherman marched from Savannah toward Columbia, Grant besieged Lee at Petersburg, and Stoneman mustered his cavalry in Nashville—Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment to end slavery throughout the United States.
 Lincoln's signature was unnecessary, since the president does not have a constitutional role in the amendment process. As far as I know, the 13th is the only one actually signed by a president. 
 The 13th Amendment would not become part of the Constitution until it was ratified by 27 of the 36 states. That meant it would need to be approved by several of the southern states. By the time Stoneman raided Boone eight weeks later, 19 states had already ratified it. The amendment process stalled after Lincoln was assassinated, and it turns out that Reconstruction governments in Stoneman's path were the final four who made it the law of the land: South Carolina Nov. 13, Alabama Dec. 2, North Carolina Dec. 4, and Georgia Dec. 6, 1865.
 Mississippi could have been the clincher but voted against ratification Dec. 5, 1865. It would be nearly 130 years before Mississippi formally approved the 13th Amendment in 1995.

➤NEXT: Cross your eyes and it's 1863

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What? You've never seen "Horn in the West"?

Let me know when you're in Boone this summer, and you can be my guest.