1865 Boone raid made The New York Times

     The New York Times has been expanding its digital library, and today I discovered it now includes a little story on Stoneman's Raid in Boone.
     The invasion of Boone was on the front page April 3, 1865, but was overshadowed by the fall of Richmond and Petersburg. The "VICTORY!" headline foreshadowed Robert E. Lee's surrender April 9. In the same triumphant spirit, The Times wrote, "Gen. Stoneman's command is now well into North Carolina and will be heard of soon in the heart of rebeldom."

     The Times' primary source was the report Gen. Stoneman sent back to his Knoxville headquarters from Boone. (There were no reporters embedded with the raid.) This story says the Union cavalry captured Boone on March 27, instead of the March 28 date that has been accepted by historians. It also overstates the casualties (Stoneman reported nine killed, but researchers have found only one Confederate soldier and two civilians who died.)

     If you would like to revisit The Stoneman Gazette's coverage of the Boone skirmish, start here, or type Boone in the searchbar at right, or explore the links at the bottom of this post.
     The Times also included information relayed from two Virginia newspapers, the March 29 Lynchburg Virginian and the March 31 Richmond Whig (which had grown "disgusted with the Confederate habit of lying.") These describe Stoneman's previous movements in eastern Tennessee from a Confederate perspective. 
     The reference to the evacuation of Bristol is interesting, because Stoneman feinted in that direction before turning south and crossing the mountains toward Boone. He wanted to force the Confederates to commit their troops to defend the Tennessee valley, and this story shows his ploy worked. This news would have reached Lynchburg via train or telegraph along the Virgina & Tennessee Railroad. On April 5, Stoneman cut that lifeline.
     (The town described as Taylorsville is now known as Mountain City. The commander mentioned is Major Myles Keogh, Stoneman's Aide-de-Camp. The Kentucky officer is Major George F. Barnes, whose story I will save for Halloween.)
     Here's an easier-to-read digital transcript of the clipping above:

NEXT➤ Memorial Day: Stoneman's toll

 RELATED BOONE & WATAUGA COUNTY STORIES

Jan. 25: The month they drove old Dixie down

Feb. 1: Abraham Lincoln and the Horn of Freedom

March 23: Stabbing the Confederacy in the back

March 26: 'A Yankee gentleman can steal butter'

March 27: Stoneman's midnight ride takes a wrong turn

March 27: Rallying the Home Guard to fight the Yankees

March 28: Blink and you'll miss the 'battle' of Boone

April 6: Meanwhile, back in Boone

April 17: Historical marker finally finds its way home

Editor's note: Covering Stoneman's Raid

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.

     There were no reporters* embedded with Stoneman's Raid, and if there had been, they would have had no way to file stories, since Gen. Stoneman was usually operating deep in enemy territory without telegraph connections.  
 However, northern papers did have war correspondents covering the armies of Grant and Sherman. For example, here is The New York Times' story on the Confederate capture of Gen. George Stoneman during Sherman's 1864 siege of Atlanta. (The text comes from a digital scan, which is a wonderful new tool for historians, though not flawless, as readers will see.)
 As a major general, Stoneman was the highest-ranking officer the Confederates ever captured. He was held in relative comfort in Macon and Charleston, compared to the appalling conditions at the Andersonville prison that he was trying to liberate when he was caught. Two months later, Stoneman was freed in a prisoner swap negotiated by Sherman. 
 News moved slowly back then. Stoneman was captured July 31, 1864, and it was not until Aug. 15 that The New York Times had the story, datelined Aug. 9 from Nashville and signed by a reporter named Handel. The second half of the story is a breathless letter dated Aug. 3 from Lt. Col. R.W. Smith, who escaped when Stoneman was captured.

 As we follow the progress of Stoneman's Raid, remember that his army was not usually concentrated in one place. To surprise and overwhelm the enemy, his troops were in almost perpetual motion, rarely pausing to camp for more than a few hours. If one brigade napped, another might leapfrog them. Stoneman liked to march overnight and attack at dawn.
 On the road, his 4,000 mounted soldiers could stretch 10 miles. On April 5 in Virginia, he unleashed simultaneous raids nearly 100 miles apart. On April 11 in North Carolina, he attacked six locations at once. So if our datelines don't always correspond to where the news is happening, you can blame Stoneman.
 Careful readers may also notice a few occasions that the date within the story is not exactly 150 years ago. This happens with a few stories that I considered timeless, and I took the liberty of rescheduling them so they would not be lost behind breaking news the same day. For example, so much happened on March 28 in and around Boone that I've spread the stories over four days. To avoid confusion, out-of-sequence stories generally do not have datelines.

 Though there were no reporters assigned to Stoneman's Raid, the cavalry included at least one future newspaper editor (Ohio Capt. Frank Mason) and a couple of experienced printers. Pennsylvania Capt. Henry Weand kept journals so rich that I commissioned him as the unofficial war correspondent for The Stoneman Gazette. You'll find excerpts from his journal in many of our stories.
 The raiders published their own little "extras" on confiscated presses in Salisbury, N.C.; Spartanburg, S.C.; and Athens, Ga. I was delighted to find this special edition of Southern Watchman.

NEXT➤ The longest raid begins with a single debt

Scoop! Sly Stoneman chides rebel church

     Gen. George Stoneman was no abolitionist, but there was at least one time when he deserves credit for doing the right thing, if not necessarily for the right reason.
     On June 5, 1865, The New-York Times reprinted a story from Brownlow's Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator, a federally funded and wonderfully named newspaper, describing an episode when Stoneman favored the education of black children over the edification of white Presbyterians.
     Stories like this occasionally emerge as old newspapers are digitized. I haven't found this one in any other account on the worldwide web, so until someone tells me otherwise, The Stoneman Gazette is claiming this as a historical scoop:

(Clipping from The New-York Times, June 5, 1865, Page 1, Column 6)

     My fellow grace-filled Methodists and ink-stained wretches of the press will enjoy the rest of this story:
     William Gannaway Brownlow was a circuit-riding Methodist preacher in the 1820s who made newspapers his pulpit starting in 1839, when he published the Tennessee Whig in Elizabethton. In 1863, the Federal government actually provided "the Fighting Parson" with a press and funding to publish Brownlow's Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator as a pro-Union voice in eastern Tennessee during the war. As far as I know, nobody complained about freedom of the press or separation of church and state. They must have had beeen preoccupied with something more important.

'The Fighting Parson'

     Brownlow was elected governor of Tennessee in 1864, and just two days after he was inaugurated—on April 7, 1865—he got the state legislature to ratify the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. Stoneman's second in command, Gen. Alvan Gillem, was an elected member of that legislature, but since he was on duty with the Army in Virginia, he was not able to vote on the amendment.
     Brownlow pushed for Tennessee to become the first Confederate state readmitted to the Union, which indeed happened July 24, 1866. 
     The following is from a profile of Brownlow written by a University of Tennessee historian:

     Seemingly never in doubt about his own rectitude, Brownlow regarded anyone who disagreed with him about religion or politics as an enemy. The circuit-riding Methodist parson turned to the press to spread his harsh anti-Presbyterian, anti-Calvinist, anti-Baptist rhetoric, and to branch out into politics. Brownlow’s speeches and publications drew both attention and anger. Founded in 1855, Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig expressed its owner’s fervently held views on the inferiority of blacks and his unalterable opposition to secession.
     In 1861, Brownlow’s criticism of the Confederacy led the government to shut down the Brownlow’s Weekly Whig for two years. On December 6 of that year, Brownlow was arrested on a charge of high treason against the Confederacy. Brownlow spent much of 1862 touring the North, giving pro-Union, invective-spiced lectures. When he returned to Knoxville in the fall of 1863, the federal government provided him with a press, some type, $1,500, and a government printing contract. On November 11, 1863, the first issue of the weekly Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator rolled off the press.
     Brownlow used the paper to attack the secessionists as “the negro-worshipping aristocracy [and] the cotton and tobacco-planting lords.” He declared that the “halter” (noose) should be used against the rebellion’s leaders, and he backed Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. Thus, the political trajectory of Brownlow’s editorials had changed from southern Whig in the 1840s to radical Republican by the mid-1860s. In 1864, Brownlow was a force in the convention that abolished slavery in Tennessee and that led to the creation of a new state government. The Unionists won control of the Tennessee legislature, and Brownlow was elected governor in April 1865. Hatred of Brownlow and the Unionists became more intense as laws were passed to disenfranchise those who supported the Confederacy and to give blacks the vote.
     When Brownlow became governor, he turned over the editorship of the Whig to his son, John Bell Brownlow. In February 1866, the title reverted to Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig. In 1869, the paper was sold, and Thomas H. Pearne became editor. It was renamed the Weekly Knoxville Whig, but after only one edition the owners changed the name again to the Knoxville Weekly Whig. After resigning as governor in 1869 and despite his fragile health, Brownlow served a six-year term in the United States Senate. He returned to Knoxville in 1875 and joined William Rule’s weekly Knoxville Whig and Chronicle as editor-in-chief. William Gannaway Brownlow died on April 29, 1877, at age 71.
     Brownlow’s pugnacious editorial stances and willingness to meet violence with violence made him famous and earned him the nickname, “The Fighting Parson.” In the 1830s, before he started newspapering, he was sued for libel and shot in a religious dispute. In the years that followed, Brownlow was shot at through a window in his home, shot in the leg during a fistfight, beaten at a camp meeting after his derringer misfired, and severely injured by two attacks with clubs. One of his newspaper’s slogans sums up both his journalism and his life, “Independent in all things—Neutral in nothing."

NEXT➤ Warhorses: Indispensable yet disposable

Good Friday and Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, which falls on April 3 this year and was April 14 in 1865. On this solemn day when Christians remember the supreme sacrifice made by Jesus Christ to free us from sin and death, here's a glimpse of what Good Friday meant to Americans seven-score and ten years ago. Richard Wightman Fox, author of Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession, wrote this column for the New York Times in 2006:

The President Who Died for Us

By RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX

Published April 14, 2006 in the New York TImes

     Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ's crucifixion, falls on April 14 in 2006, as it did in 1865. On that evening, in the balcony box of Ford's Theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth fired a handmade .41-caliber derringer ball into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head.

     In the days that followed Lincoln's death, his mourning compatriots rushed to compare him to Jesus, Moses and George Washington.

     Despite the Good Friday coincidence, the Jesus parallel was not an obvious one for 19th-century Americans to make. The Protestant population, then as now, included a vigilant evangelical minority who thought that Jesus, sinless on earth, was defamed every time ordinary sinners presumed to imitate him. No mere mortal could be put beside Jesus on a moral balance scale.

     But Honest Abe overwhelmed the usual evangelical reticence—by April 1865 the majority of Northerners and Southern blacks took him as no ordinary person. He had been offering his body and soul all through the war and his final sacrifice, providentially appointed for Good Friday, showed that God had surely marked him for sacred service.

     At a mass assembly in Manhattan five hours after Lincoln's death, James A. Garfield—the Ohio congressman who would become the second assassinated president 16 years later—voiced the common hesitancy, then went on to claim the analogy: "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God."

     Jesus had saved humanity, or at least some portion of it, from eternal damnation. Lincoln had saved the nation from the civic equivalent of damnation: the dissolution that had always bedeviled republics. "Jesus Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham Lincoln died for his country."

     The small minority of Jews and Catholics, equally awed by Lincoln's bodily sacrifice, joined Protestants in hailing the president's uncommon virtues: forgiveness, mercy, defense of the poor and the oppressed. Catholics joined Protestants in noting his Christ-like habits of brooding in private and keeping his own counsel.

     Nearly everyone joined in heralding Lincoln's phrase "with malice toward none, with charity for all," which Christian mourners hailed as the heart of the Gospel. Those words from his second inaugural address, delivered just six weeks before his death, turned up on hand-scrawled banners all over the Union. People mounted them, along with black-bordered flags and photographs of Lincoln, in the windows of their homes and shops.

     Thomas Nast's 1866 painting "President Lincoln Entering Richmond" (commemorating his surprise stroll into the capital of the Confederacy on April 4, 1865, shortly after Robert E. Lee's retreat) reinforced the sentiment: Lincoln shepherded his people just as Jesus did. The president walked into Richmond before Holy Week the way Jesus rode into Jerusalem before Passover: humbly, not triumphantly. Both men were enveloped by exuberant admirers.

     Most American Christians turned to the Jesus analogy because they realized how much they loved Lincoln. They took his loss as personal, often comparing it to a death in the family. Many felt attached to Lincoln almost as they felt attached to Jesus. The striving rail-splitter from Illinois and the simple carpenter from Nazareth resembled them, the people. In contrast, while still heroic, Washington seemed more distant, even aloof.

     Yet calculation as well as veneration entered the campaign to sanctify Lincoln. Radical Republicans revealed a political reason for comparing Lincoln to Jesus. Trying to explain why a rational Providence had permitted Lincoln to die, they decided that the savior of the nation had proved himself too Christ-like, too softhearted, too "womanly," for the necessarily punitive job of "reconstructing" the postwar South. God in his wisdom had put Andrew Johnson in place for the messy task of enacting justice.

     Many Protestants also displayed a religious motive for emphasizing the resemblance between Lincoln and Christ. They made the president a virtual holy man because they wished retroactively to make him a morally impeccable and believing Christian. They considered theater-going, a favorite pastime of the president, as morally dubious; his choice of the stage for recreation on this day of crucifixion made them sick at heart.

     And Lincoln, who after 1862 had spoken repeatedly of his dependence on God and Providence, had never referred much to Jesus. The barrage of Jesus comparisons offered a camouflaging aura of piety for a man who had enjoyed lowbrow, off-color humor as much as play-acting.

     Seven score and one years have passed since Good Friday 1865, and Lincoln has always remained his own man. In his final years, he had set his own course by balancing a pressing sense of the rule of Providence with a persistent belief in the power of reason.
     Still, he can—and should—stand as historic demonstration that a republican hero's sacrifice for the people comes very close to Christ's ideals of self-denial and self-giving.

NEXT➤ 'I believe I am talking to the Yankees now'

Penning heads on Civil War tales

 They don't make headlines like they used to.
 As dying newspapers lay off the ink-stained wretches on the copy desks, we may never see another headline quite like this verbless wonder written by Vincent Musetto for the New York Post in 1983—the most unforgettable head in the history of journalism.

 Headline writing is an art. It may be a dying art—a victim of malnewstrition—but the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) still has a #HeadlineoftheYear contest to recognize the finest examples. If you are curious about the state of the art, here are the winners for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015. 
 At The Stoneman Gazette, we take pride in our headlines and have never laid off a copy editor. If ACES ever adds a prize category for anachronistic online newspapers, here are a few of our favorites we'd like to nominate.
 If you feel enticed to click on any of these blue links, go hug a headline writer. 

From Concord to Conquered: Two Revolutions

This headline works best in a Boston accent, where Concord rhymes with conquered.

Rebels and their bridge fall for Yankee-pranky

If you're ever caught in a headline fight, remember that the pun is mightier than the sword. This story describes a ruse involving a Union captain (a 27-year-old teacher with the eminently punable name of Erastus Cratty Moderwell) who impersonated 43-year-old Gen. George Stoneman to fool and intimidate Confederate forces who had him outnumbered. The rebels unwittingly surrendered the Nation Ford railroad trestle connecting the Carolinas, and the Yankees burned it down before Jefferson Davis could cross it.

Headquarters on Caesars Head

Here's my double-headed homage to Vincent Musetto (who died four weeks after we ended the daily run of The Stoneman Gazette). When the Yankees headed south out of Asheville and crossed the Blue Ridge at Caesars Head, they looked down on rebellious South Carolina in more ways than one. While they were descending, they were also condescending. (And don't blame me for the genitive apostrophe missing from Caesars Head. That's the style established by the U.S. Bureau of Geographic Names, page 30.) 

Your taxes are still paying for Stoneman's Raid

If a headline can't be cute, it needs to be profound. It should make the reader feel personally invested in the story. In this case, we thought our fellow Americans would want to know that until 2020, Uncle Sam was still paying for the Civil War—and the monthly checks are being cashed by the daughter of one of Stoneman's veterans. In a different era, this 1938 Gettysburg headline about her father also did a good job of enticing readers:

The longest raid begins with a single debt

Headline writers often start with a familiar phrase and then twist it like one of Sherman's neckties. You can understand why we wrote raid instead of journey, and here's why we changed step to debt: After rebels captured Gen. Stoneman in 1864, he became the highest-ranked prisoner in the South and a laughingstock in some parts of the North. So when he got a chance to vindicate himself with a thousand-mile raid in 1865, he declared, "I owe the Southern Confederacy a debt I am anxious to liquidate."

Myles to go: Stoneman's rock star

The story includes a quote about s-e-x from Myles Keogh, a debonair Yankee officer and international man of mystery. We resisted the temptation to use that cheap clickbait in our headline, because it would have been beneath our dignity. Instead, we'll tease you with it here—underskirting our headline.

Twin fiddling: Tom Dooley and Gilliam Grayson

The Kingston Trio and Doc Watson were also part of this story, but the title characters were both fiddlers, and young Tom fiddled around in more ways than one. In fact, he had a harem of cousins. For headline writers, a double entendre is the triple crown. 

Pyres in Salisbury, but a pyrrhic victory for rebs

It's a rare headline that can pair two pyr-words. It almost makes me want to go back and rewrite the story in inverted pyramid. Almost.

Four days in a den of Yankee lions

I like to include Bible allusions in my headlines. With Stoneman's cavalry fast approaching the Carson House, Miss Emma Rankin wrote that she still made it to church on Easter Sunday, "and our blessed old pastor gave us all the hope and strength he could gather from the Bible, reminding us that there were lions in the way, but God could shut the lions' mouths."

'Destroy Charlotte!' 'Will Asheville do?'

"If it's a good headline, we'll make it fit," Phil Batson used to say. But blogs, like newspapers, have fixed widths for columns and pages, and the challenge is to say a lot in a few words (in this case: 34 counts). This headline sums up a flurry of messages between Gen. Stoneman in Knoxville and two of his cavalry brigades in the North Carolina mountains.

How to stop the U.S. Cavalry? With a winefest

The purpose of a headline is to get you to stop and read the story. Clickbait, they call it nowadays. I think this one clicks. The bacchanalian story comes from my hometown of Anderson, S.C.

Scoop! Sly Stoneman chides rebel church

The little story behind this headline was lost to history until The Stoneman Gazette dredged it out of the The New York Times digital archives. "Chides" is such a fine word that it is usually reserved for headlines. Otherwise, our headline might have been Education of black children vs. edification of white Presbyterians. Sly readers of my generation may read something else into that headline.

Greenville mule gets Yankee's goat
The raiders quickly wore out their horses, and one Yankee regretted the day he swiped a mule from the plantation of a Revolutionary war hero.

Tell Mama! The War is Finally Over
A month after Lee's surrender, the war and the raid were still dragging on. So was the daily run of The Stoneman Gazette. We needed a way to finish strong, and I think we found it in our Mothers Day issue, which featured heartfelt quotes from the likes of Abe Lincoln, Stonewall Jackson's mother, and Mark Twain. Some newspapers don't like exclamations in headlines, but we're different, and moms are special.

Jeff Davis' dilemma: Station wagon or mustang?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Fifty years ago, my father burned up the transmission in his 1960 Ford station wagon while hauling five children and a camping trailer up Black Rock Mountain in Rabun County, Georgia. I'm dusting off these memories because of striking similarities to Jefferson Davis' travels on the other end of Georgia 150 years ago. Jeff and Varina Davis also had five children in a wagon, and he could almost smell the Union cavalry burning up the road behind him. —Tom Layton

To outrun the Yankees, Jefferson Davis would have to abandon his children:
Jeff Jr., 8, Maggie, 10, Billy, 4, and Winnie, 1. The Davises also had a foster child,
 Jim, 4, a freed slave who was separated from them after they were captured.

IRWINVILLE, Ga.

     As his family settled into a tent in a pine grove under a full moon on the night of May 9, 1865, Jefferson Finis Davis knew the time had come for him to make an unthinkable choice. He realized he couldn't save both his family and his country. Which way would he go?
     Would Jeff Davis take the station wagon, or a Mustang?

     Clint Johnson explained Davis' dilemma in his book Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution, and Surprising Release of Jefferson Davis:

      Davis was torn between his duty to his family and to his country.
      He knew his aides were correct that the wagons slowed the pace. If he stayed with the wagons, he stood a higher chance of being captured than if he rode ahead by himself. His methodical mind told him that if he could ride alone, he still had a chance of reaching Texas. If he found Taylor and Kirby Smith, then the Confederacy still lived. [Richard Taylor, a Confederate general in Alabama, was the son of former president Zachary Taylor and the brother of Jeff Davis' first wife. Davis had no way of knowing that Gen. Taylor had surrendered May 8. In Texas, Smith surrendered May 26.]
      But the wagons were also the only way Davis' family could escape. The children were too small, too young to ride fast horses. They had no choice but to ride in the slow wagons; leaving deep ruts cut into the mud, an obvious trail that anyone could follow with ease. He had heard the stories that unsavory characters wanted those wagons: Confederates hungry for food, and Federals hungry to bag the president of the Confederacy.
     The mind of Davis, the family man, now battled with the mind of Davis, the man who had sworn to serve the Confederacy.
     What kind of father would abandon his children to an unknown fate just to save himself from capture? What kind of husband would leave his wife armed with a pistol to protect her children while he ran away? But what kind of president would put the safety of his family above the needs of the entire Confederate nation?
     Still, if he left the armed guards with the wagons, allowing them to pose as well-meaning protectors of this refugee family, Varina and the children would be as safe as he could make them. Marauders would probably think carefully before attacking a wagon train protected by more than a dozen rifles. Federals might look at the wagon train, but if they did not find anyone matching Davis' description, they might let it pass. The Federals were looking for him, not his wife and children. As far as Davis knew, the government did not even know that his wife and children were anywhere near him.
     Davis had not worked out exactly what he would do when he went to sleep on the night of May 9. He would make his decision the next day. Three things he did were to stay dressed in his suit, to keep his horse saddled, and to put his pistols loaded in the holsters that were attached to his saddle.

     When Davis awoke at dawn on May 10, his tent was surrounded by Michigan cavalry. At almost the same moment, shooting broke out between Michigan and Wisconsin troops who each thought the other was Confederate. (Two Yankees died in this incident.) In the chaos, on the spur of the moment, Davis decided to abandon both his family and his country and tried to save himself, scurrying toward the woods, possibly accompanied by two women.
     Was the Confederate president disguised as a woman? That's how the northern cartoonists portrayed his capture. Mrs. Davis said she had thrown her raglan over his shoulders and a shawl over his head, though the stories of him wearing a petticoat make no sense if he was trying to escape.
     Gen. James Wilson telegraphed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on May 13 to tell him Davis was in custody. "The captors report that he hastily put on one of Mrs. Davis' dresses and started for the woods, closely pursued by our men, who at first thought him a woman, but seeing his boots while running, suspected his sex at once."

      Stanton, who was trying to implicate Davis in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, shared the telegram with the New York Times. Victors write history, and Davis became a laughingstock.
     He wound up being imprisoned for two years but was never charged with treason. President Johnson released him in 1867 as a goodwill gesture toward the South. Davis was reunited with his family and they returned to their homeland.
     Davis' sons all died tragically: Samuel (measles, 1854, age 2), Joseph (fell from a balcony at Confederate White House, 1864, age 5), Billy (diphtheria, 1871, age 10) and Jeff Jr. (yellow fever, 1878, age 21). His daughter Maggie gave him four grandchildren. Varina Howell Davis, who was 18 years younger than her husband, outlived him by 17 years.
     Davis spent his last 12 years at Beauvoir, a stately home in Biloxi, Miss., that was nearly destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. One of Davis' great-great-grandsons became executive director of Beauvoir in 2012 but stepped down in 2014 in a dispute with the veterans' association that owns the house. Evidently, he thought it was time to curtail the display of the Confederate flag. They thought that was treasonous.
     Old times there are not forgotten.

     Frank H. Mason, an Ohio cavalryman who had pursued Davis as part of Stoneman's Raid, described him as "the Prince of Traitors" in a story published in the Cleveland Leader three weeks after the capture:

     Jeff Davis enjoys the hatred of the Southern heart. He has failed to please the people or the army. He is now cursed as the agent of their misfortune. Gen. Lee is their admiration, and could have swayed them anywhere. Jeff Davis has lost their entire confidence and incurred displeasure by disregarding their popular will. The Confederate government has never been the embodiment of the Southern purpose.

     Ulysses Grant wrote in his memoirs that President Lincoln would have been content if Davis had escaped the country:

     Mr. Lincoln, I believe, wanted Mr. Davis to escape, because he did not wish to deal with the matter of his punishment. He knew there would be people clamoring for the punishment of the ex-Confederate president, for high treason. He thought blood enough had already been spilled to atone for our wickedness as a nation. At all events he did not wish to be the judge to decide whether more should be shed or not. But his own life was sacrificed at the hands of an assassin before the ex-president of the Confederacy was a prisoner in the hands of the government which he had lent all his talent and all his energies to destroy.

     In 1978, Congress restored Jefferson Davis' U.S. citizenship. President Jimmy Carter, who was born 80 miles from where Davis was captured, said in effect that it was high time for our nation to get over the Civil War. His proclamation: 

     In posthumously restoring the full rights of citizenship to Jefferson Davis, the Congress officially completes the long process of reconciliation that has reunited our people following the tragic conflict between the States. Earlier, he was specifically exempted from resolutions restoring the rights of other officials in the Confederacy. He had served the United States long and honorably as a soldier, member of the U.S. House and Senate, and as Secretary of War. General Robert E. Lee's citizenship was restored in 1976. It is fitting that Jefferson Davis should no longer be singled out for punishment.
     Our Nation needs to clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past, to finally set at rest the divisions that threatened to destroy our Nation and to discredit the principles on which it was founded. Our people need to turn their attention to the important tasks that still lie before us in establishing those principles for all people. 

The Davises with daughter Maggie and three grandchildren at Beauvoir, about 1885. Jefferson Hayes-Davis, on Varina's lap, was the grandfather of Bertram Hayes-Davis, who resigned as Beauvoir's executive director in 2014 in a dispute over the Confederate flag.

NEXT➤ Tell Mama! The Civil War is Over

The ghost of Della Barnes

Della Barnes' truncated statue

PADUCAH, Ky.

 Della Barnes was a heartbreaker. One man gave her an expensive engagement ring, but she chose to marry another. The jilted man was so enraged that he cut off Della's ring finger, and she bled to death. 
 Or so the legend goes.
 The true story of Della's demise, as reported in the Paducah Daily Sun, is just as haunting. One summer night in 1897, Della told a friend that she didn't feel well and was going to take a dose of calomel, a mercury compound that is now known to be toxic but back then was used to treat various ailments. By accident, she swallowed morphine instead. Della went to bed and never woke up.
 The heartbroken man in this real-life tragedy was her father, Major George Barnes. A Tennessee native who remained loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War, he rode with the 12th Kentucky Cavalry in Stoneman's Raid and was mentioned in the New York Times for his leadership in the invasion of Boone, N.C. He was also entrusted with the destruction of the Confederate armory at Salisbury.
 After the war, Maj. Barnes married 17-year-old Anna Robinson and became a successful coal merchant and city councilman in Paducah, a city on the lower Ohio River across from Illinois.

Della's original monument

 Della was born in 1874, when her father was 38. He had three other daughters (two grew up to marry and one died at age five), but Della was his darling, and after she died on June 27, 1897, he never got over it. To mark her grave, he commissioned an Italian sculptor to carve a life-sized statue of Della holding a rose over her heart.
 Over the next year, he was engulfed by grief, his business failed, and his debts mounted.
 On November 3, 1898, Barnes bought 30 grains of morphine—the same drug that had killed Della. That's enough to kill 10 men. To get so much, he had to go to two apothecaries, and he told one of them he needed it for a sick horse. Instead, he swallowed it all with a bottle of whiskey. Hours later when his family found him, they called the same doctor who had tried to revive Della, but it was too late.
 Barnes, 62, left a note written on paper that had wrapped the morphine, explaining that he had no domestic trouble, but that he took his life because of financial embarrassment and his grief over Della's death. He asked God to have mercy on his soul and take care of his little grandson.
 According to his obituary:

The deceased was a good, conscientious man, and highly esteemed by all who knew him. His friends were numbered by the hundred, and among them are not only his old comrades at arms in the Union army, but the men who fought on the other side as well, and for whom he always showed the highest regard and friendship.

 Major Barnes was buried in an unmarked grave next to Della in Paducah's Oak Grove cemetery.
 Today, Della's grave is barely recognizable. Her monument has disappeared, piece by piece. After vandals broke off her ring finger, people swore they saw the statue bleeding or crying. Then her head and torso disappeared. Now, all that remains is the marble foundation, decorated by flowers.
 But some people say ... if you dare to visit the cemetery at night on the anniversary of her death, you just might see Della's pale ghost walking the darkened paths through the old oak grove, clutching a blood-red rose over her heart.

NEXT➤ Vet's dilemma: Which side would he fight for?

Paducah Daily Sun, June 28, 1897

Paducah Daily Sun, Nov. 5, 1898

Greenville: 'Prepare to Meet Your God'

A noble Yankee from Tennessee:
Union Capt. Isaac Taylor

 

GREENVILLE, S.C.

 The Stoneman Gazette has unearthed more information about the skirmish in Greenville, S.C., in May, 1865, that I believe was the last Civil War clash east of the Mississippi.

National Tribune, Sept. 5, 1889

 This clipping was published July 18, 1889, in the National Tribune, a weekly newspaper catering to Union veterans. I found it reprinted Sept. 5, 1889, in the Anderson Intelligencer.

 It is a letter written by Isaac Taylor, a Union captain from Tennessee who was ordered to execute four Confederates accused of mistreating and robbing some of Stoneman's sick and wounded soldiers as they were being evacuated to Knoxville.
 Convinced that the rebels were innocent, Capt. Taylor defied his orders and made a noble last-minute decision to spare their lives.
 I believe that Taylor is describing the same incident that was documented in 2002 by Greenville historian John McLeod, though there are some discrepancies in their stories, and it is possible there were two similar incidents.
 Taylor gives the date as May 24 (rather than May 22 or 23) and the location as 25 miles from Greenville at the foot of the Blue Ridge (not Crescent Ridge near downtown Greenville). He says there were four Confederates (rather than three) facing the firing squad. The 1903 history of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry says it was Lt. T.C. White (rather than Capt. Taylor) who was ordered to carry out the executions.
 Capt. Taylor vividly described the scene as the rebels awaited their fate:

They were informed of the order and given 10 minutes in which to prepare to meet their God. I had passed through many battles and trials, but this was the most trying ordeal of my life. The utter despair depicted on their countenances, while great rivers of perspiration ran down their pallid faces, makes me shudder yet when I think of how near four innocent men were to being murdered by the command "fire" given from my lips.

 Then the surgeon (Dr. James Cameron) recognized a gesture from one of the rebels as the Masons' "Grand-Hailing Sign of Distress." Dr. Cameron was a Mason, and so was Col. Miller, the brigade commander who had ordered the executions.  This made Miller reconsider the charges, and he set the captives free.
 The Civil War is full of stories like this where lives were spared after enemies discovered they were brothers in the secret society of the Masons. In fact, there is a Masonic Memorial at Gettysburg called "Friend to Friend" (pictured below) that honors these traditions. Several similar accounts are found in the annals of Stoneman's Raid. No doubt some are apocryphal, but I think this one is credible, since it is reported by both sides. 

Emporia (Kan.) News, Jan. 24, 1884

 Capt. Taylor (1843-1892) grew up in eastern Tennessee, which was predominantly pro-Union and opposed to secession. When the war began, he enlisted with an Illinois regiment. In 1863 he joined the Union's 13th Tennessee Cavalry, commanding Company B and serving as Acting Assistant Adjutant General under Col. John Miller. The 13th Tennessee was one of eight Yankee regiments that marched with Stoneman's Raid in the spring of 1865. They fought at Wytheville and the Yadkin River bridge and were involved in the pursuit of Jefferson Davis.
 According to this 1884 newspaper tribute, he was the first man in Carter County, Tennessee, to make a stand for Negro suffrage, and he was among the first Republicans elected to the Tennessee legislature. 
 Republicans fell out of favor at the end of Reconstruction, so Capt. Taylor moved to Hartford, Kan., where he built a mill, became president of the local bank, and served as an Indian agent.
 He wrote to the National Tribune in 1889 hoping to make contact with his forgiven enemies:

I disobeyed orders, turned them over to the brigade commander at noon with a full statement of what had occurred, and he discharged them. They were happy, but I cannot believe that they were more so than I was. A Masonic sign saved their lives, and no doubt, saved me from great remorse. If those four ex-Confederates, or any of them, are living, I would be very happy indeed to hear from them.

 Earlier in 1889, Taylor had written to the National Tribune in another attempt to reconcile with the enemy. He said he was seeking to find the rightful owner of a Virginia regimental banner "he captured from the rebels in South Carolina in the spring of 1865." The 13th Tennessee passed through the northwest corner of South Carolina twice during Stoneman's Raid, but I am not aware of any fights they had there with Virginians.

 Taylor died three years later at age 49, and I don't know if he ever heard from any of those rebels. Although he was not familiar with Masonic rites during the war, he evidently apprenticed later, because his obituary says his funeral was conducted by the Knights Templar with Masonic honors.
 According to a biographical sketch in the History of the 13th Regiment, Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry: 

Captain Taylor was an officer of the highest courage, never evading any duty or danger, but was always among the first to reach the danger line when there was fighting to be done. He possessed fine social qualities and a high sense of honor that endeared him to all who knew him.

The Masonic Memorial at Gettysburg portrays Union Capt. Henry Bingham
comforting Confederate Gen. Lewis Armistead, who was
 mortally wounded during Pickett's Charge.

 

 

The fallen Gen. Armistead is portrayed in this Gettysburg scene, painted by James Walker and displayed in the Johnson Collection at the Spartanburg County Library in S.C. 

New York Times, Feb. 20, 1870

NEXT➤ The ghost of Della Barnes