The Taylor-Trotwood Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 4, January 1907

This was one of the popular songs current after the close of the war:

I followed old Marse Robert For four years, near about; Got wounded in three places, And starved at P’int Lookout.

Why Marse Robert? Major Stiles gives the reason[6]:

The passion of soldiers for nicknaming their favorite leaders, rechristening them according to their own unfettered fancy, is well known.... There is something grotesque about most of them, and in many seemingly rank disrespect.... However this may be, “Marse Robert” is far above the rest of soldier nicknames in pathos and in power.

In the first place, it is essentially _military_ ... it rings true upon the elemental basis of military life—unquestioning and unlimited _obedience_.... There never could have been a second “Marse Robert,” and but for the unparalleled elevation and majesty of his character and bearing, there would never have been the first. He was of all men most attractive to us, yet by no means most approachable. We loved him much, but we revered him more. We never criticised, never doubted him; never attributed to him either moral error or mental weakness; no, not even in our secret hearts or most audacious thoughts. I really believe it would have strained and blurred our strongest and clearest conceptions of the distinction between right and wrong to have entertained, even for a moment, the thought that he had ever acted from any other than the purest and loftiest motive.... The proviso with which a ragged rebel accepted the doctrine of evolution, that “the rest of us may have descended or ascended from monkeys, but it took a God to make ‘Marse Robert,’” had more than mere humor in it.... We never compared him with other men, either friend or foe. He was in a superlative and absolute class by himself. Beyond a vague suggestion, after the death of Jackson, as to what might have been if he had lived, I cannot recall even an approach to a comparative estimate of Lee.

[Illustration: VALENTINE’S RECUMBENT LEE STATUE

At Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia]

Lee’s devotion to his soldiers and theirs to him are referred to by one of Pickett’s captains[7]:

Many of those who had been wounded in the battle of the first day went into the great charge on the third day with bandages on their heads or arms, at sight of which the imperturbable Lee shed tears.... Here was a devotion of which the Romans of old had never dreamed; here was a holocaust of sacrificial victims such as Greece had never known! The men who at Marathon and Leuctra bled were not greater heroes than those who fell at Gettysburg.

In a small volume of War Sketches, issued shortly after the war, I found the following anecdote contributed to a Washington paper by Miss Woolsey, a nurse sent to Gettysburg with the Sanitary Commission:

One of the Gettysburg farmers came creeping into our camp three weeks after the battle. He lived five miles only from the town and had “never seen a Rebel.” He heard we had some of them, and came down to see them. “Boys, here’s a man who never saw a Rebel in his life, and wants to look at you.” There he stood, with his mouth wide open, and there they lay in rows, laughing at him. “And why haven’t you seen a Rebel?” Mrs. ⸺ asked. “Why didn’t you take your gun and help to drive them out of your town?” “A feller might er got hit,” which reply was quite too much for the Rebels; they roared with laughter up and down the tents.

After the surrender at Appomattox General Lee joined his family at Richmond for a short period of rest before taking up the “burdens of life again.” “There was,” writes General Long,[8] “a continuous stream of callers at the residence ... upon every hand manifestations of respect were shown him.” General Long gives some touching incidents:

One morning an Irishman who had gone through the war in the Federal ranks appeared at the door with a basket well filled with provisions, and insisted upon seeing General Lee.... The general came from an adjoining room and was greeted with profuse terms of admiration. “Sure, sir, you’re a great soldier, and it’s I that know it. I’ve been fighting against you all these years, an’ many a hard knock we’ve had. But, general, I honor you for it; and now they tell me you’re poor an’ in want, an’ I’ve brought this basket an’ beg you to take it from a soldier.”

Two Confederate soldiers, in tattered garments and with bodies emaciated by prison confinement, called upon General Lee and told him they were delegated by sixty other fellows around the corner “too ragged to come themselves.” They tendered their beloved general a home in the mountains, promising him a comfortable house and a good farm.

“Great and star-like as was the warrior,” says Dr. Shepherd, “the man is greater.”[9]

It is said that General Lee was offered estates in England and in Ireland; also the post of commercial agent of the South at New York, and many other tenders of a home or livelihood. All of these he declined and accepted the presidency of Washington College, at Lexington.

Founded in 1789 under the name of “Augusta Academy,” the name was changed in 1782 to “Liberty Hall Academy,” from which was sent a company of students into the Revolution. Washington, who had accepted from the new State of Virginia 100 shares of the James River Company only on condition that he might give them to some school, chose this academy for beneficiary, and the name was changed in 1798 to “Washington College.” The buildings, library and apparatus had been sacked during the Federal occupancy, and the country was able to furnish only forty students at the opening of the term of ’65-’66. Nothing daunted, the new president gathered around him an able faculty, raised the standard of scholarship, renovated the old buildings and secured funds for new ones. He introduced the “honor system” and knew every student’s name, as well as his class and deportment record. Asked, at a faculty meeting, for a plan to induce students to attend the chapel, he advised: “The best way that I know of is to set them the example,” which he invariably did. This gives the keynote to his remarkable influence.

The effect of his principles was all-powerful. It is doubtful if any other college in the world could show such a high average of morals and scholarship which obtained at Washington College during Lee’s presidency of five years.

I cannot resist relating an anecdote given by another of our soldier-authors, John Esten Cooke:[10]

Coming upon the chieftain conversing cordially with an humbly clad man, he supposed that it was, of course, an old Confederate, the more so as the general, looking after the retreating figure, said kindly:

“That is one of our old soldiers who is in necessitous circumstances.” Questioned, however, he admitted that the soldier had fought on “the other side, but we must not think of that,” was his verdict.

The death of General Lee, on October 12, 1870, brought forth more encomiums from the press, personages of exalted rank, and from the people generally than has ever been accorded any man who died in private life since Washington. “I do not exaggerate,” says Dr. Jones, “when I say that many volumes would not contain the eulogies that were pronounced, for I undertook to make a partial collection of them and have a trunk full now.” In the cemetery near him at Lexington bivouacs his great lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson. They were born in the same month, the one on the nineteenth and the other on the thirty-first of January. It is fitting that they should lie near together. “I know not,” further and most fittingly continues Mr. Jones, who was chaplain of the University, “how more appropriately the tomb of Lee could be placed. The blue mountains of his loved Virginia sentinel his grave. Young men from every section throng the classic shades of Washington and Lee University, and delight to keep ward and watch at his tomb.”

[Illustration: MERCIE’S MONUMENT, LEE CIRCLE, RICHMOND]

I sing the hymn of the Conquered who fell in the battle of life, The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife; Not the jubilant song of the Victors for whom the resounding acclaim Of nations was lifted in chorus, whose brows wore the chaplet of fame. While the voice of the world shouts its chorus, its paeans for those who have won, While the trumpet is sounding triumphant, and high to the breeze and the sun Gay banners are waving, hands clapping and hurrying feet Throwing after the laurel-crowned victors, I stand on the field of Defeat. Speak, History! Who are Life’s victors? Unroll thy long annals and say; Are they those whom the world called the victors, who won the success of a day? The Martyrs or Nero? The Spartans who fell at Thermopylae’s tryst, Or the Persians and Xerxes? His judge or Socrates? Pilate or Christ?

—_W. W. Story._

[1] Popular Life of General Lee. By Emily V. Mason. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co.

[2] General Lee. By Fitzhugh Lee. New York: D. Appleton & Co. (Great Commanders Series.)

[3] Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee. By Rev. J. William Jones, D.D. New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company.

[4] Recollections of My Father. By Captain Robert E. Lee. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.

[5] General Lee. General Viscount Wolseley. Rochester, N. Y.: George P. Humphrey.

[6] Four Years under Marse Robert. By Major Robert Stiles. New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company.

[7] Gettysburg: A Battle Ode Descriptive of the Grand Charge of the Third Day, July 3, 1863. By R. W. Douthat. New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company.

[8] Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History. By General A. L. Long and General Marcus J. Wright. New York, Philadelphia and Washington: J. M. Stoddart & Co.

[9] Life of Robert Edward Lee. By Henry E. Shepherd, M.A., LL.D. New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company.

[10] Robert E. Lee. By John Esten Cooke. New York: G. W. Dillingham & Co.

HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF THE SOUTH

By John Trotwood Moore

CHAPTER XVI—THE SECOND DAY AT SHILOH

By Lewis M. Hosea

[We give way in this issue to Judge Lewis M. Hosea, Judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati and late Brevet Major U. S. Army, 16th U. S. Infantry, who gives us the viewpoint as seen by Buell’s army. In this paper by this distinguished gentleman, appears the best description of how it feels to be under fire and how the Confederate columns appeared that we have ever seen.

That particular description deserves to live as a classic and no one may read it without afterwards seeing “the surging line of butternut and gray moving rapidly across our front” and “the accompaniment of a leaden blast of hell sweeping into one’s face as though it were a sort of fierce and deadly wind impossible to stand against.”

It will also be observed that Judge Hosea takes decided issue as to certain facts published in the History of the Shiloh Battlefield Commission which we take pleasure in publishing and will accord the same privilege to any one who cares to reply, as it is by this kind of personal testimony that the truth of history is eventually established.

To the readers of TAYLOR-TROTWOOD we wish to state that these Historic Highways of the South have been running serially through Trotwood’s Monthly for fifteen months and include The Hermitage, The Creek War Highways, New Orleans, Battle of Franklin, Ft. Donelson, Shiloh and others.—THE EDITOR.]

The two days’ battle at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, fought on Sunday and Monday, April 6th and 7th, 1862, viewed from the standpoint of forty years later, looms up as one of the most significant contests of the great Civil War. The entire battlefield was a wilderness of scrub oak and kindred growths, unbroken save by a few settlers’ clearings located at random upon a plain traversed only by irregular “woods-roads,” and by drainage ravines leading by winding courses into the two creeks bounding the field of operations on the north and south—these discharging into the Tennessee River behind the Union Army.

The troops were for the most part new and untried, and the conditions of the ground made the transmission of orders difficult and uncertain. It was impossible for commanders of large bodies to obtain a comprehensive view of the field so as to perceive and provide intelligently for the varying exigencies of the battle as it progressed. They could only guess the swaying movements of the fight by sounds of musketry and by the chance reports of messengers who could locate nothing by fixed monuments. Nor could the men in ranks, or even regimental officers, see beyond a limited distance; and the direction of enfilading or turning movements could be discovered only by the course of bullets among the trees or the tearing of the ground by solid shot or shell.

These things made the battle a supreme test of the quality of the individual units of the army rather than of any directing skill of its higher commanders. The bulldog courage of individual groups of men who hung on and fought “to a finish,” or who, like Prentiss, sacrificed themselves where they stood because of no order to withdraw, delayed the general advance of the enemy and thus saved the first day from overwhelming and complete disaster. It became a case of “night or Blücher;” and when, toward evening, the leading regiments of Buell’s army arrived upon the field and interposed a fresh line of resistance, the Union troops had been driven from the field and huddled as a mass of disorganized fragments in a semicircle of half a mile radius about the landing.

But the Confederates drew off flushed with the spirit of victory and ceased fighting only to prepare for an expected certain and triumphant finish in the morning. Knowing that they had the Union forces hemmed in the semicircle of their lines extending from river to river, every Confederate soldier fully believed that surrender or annihilation of the Union forces would be easy of accomplishment.

This was the spirit and purpose that animated the Confederate forces on Monday when they began to attack soon after daylight on that second day. To the forces of Buell, arriving during the night on transports from Savannah (on the river twenty miles below), and marching up the bank in the dim light of dawn to form a cordon around the fragments of Grant’s army, the scene was dismal and discouraging in the extreme. Making our way through the thousands of men huddled on the bank, hearing at every step the doleful prognostications of defeat, the wooded plain above presented to us visible proof of the disastrous conflict of the day before in the dead and wounded who lay unattended, and the broken and discarded arms and equipments that strewed the ground. These were the sights and sounds that greeted us as we marched to our place in line of battle on the second day; and they fully justified the compliment paid us by our brigade commander, General Lovell H. Rousseau, who says, in his official report of the battle in substance: “Seldom have men gone into battle under such discouraging circumstances, and never have they borne themselves more gallantly.”

In the personal reminiscences that follow I shall speak more particularly of the part taken by Rousseau’s brigade of McCook’s division.

I was personally present throughout the second day, as Adjutant of the First Battalion, Sixteenth U. S. Infantry—which, with similar battalions of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Infantry, and the First Ohio, Fifth Indiana, and Sixth Kentucky Volunteers—constituted Rousseau’s brigade (4th) of McCook’s division (2d) of the Army of the Ohio commanded by General Buell.

My position as adjutant gave me a somewhat wider range of observation than that of a line officer on duty with a company, and I retain some very distinct recollections of the battle, which I will briefly state in so far as they bear upon the movements of Rousseau’s brigade; but I shall leave others to speak of the severity of the fighting, and leave to you to estimate the quality of the service the brigade rendered the Union cause.

Rousseau’s brigade reached Pittsburg Landing during the night of the 6th of April, 1862, by steamers from Savannah, and disembarked just before day. On the level just back of the landing, in the dim light of the coming dawn, we deposited knapsacks and advanced in a southwesterly direction through the woods, passing through camps (probably Hurlbut’s) where our dead lay unburied as they had fallen the day before. After a short halt we were advanced and deployed to the right and front at the hither edge of a broad and shallow depression, where a small brook coursed on to our right through a comparatively open forest without any visible clearing. Here we were halted, muskets loaded, and, in a short time, at a little after six o’clock, we heard firing toward our right rear, and almost immediately our own skirmishers were driven in and we were engaged with a battle line of the enemy. Then followed a steady and vigorous “stand-up” musketry fight which lasted the greater part of an hour, when the enemy drew off, but soon renewed the attack with greater vigor, only to be again repulsed.

This position was probably on Tilghman’s Creek, shown on the map of the Shiloh Battlefield Commission to which I shall refer; but the hour stated on the map as eight o’clock is wrong and should be six o’clock. By eight o’clock we had been baptized with fire and blood. Here Captain Acker of the Sixteenth was killed, and a number of other officers and men were killed and wounded.

It is an old story, perhaps, to most of you—this first experience of actual battle; yet, even now, dimly remembered through the intervening years, it seems to me the most horrifying experience that can possibly fall to the lot of man.

First came the startling report of a musket fired by one of our own skirmishers out in our front; then a crackling of responses from the woods beyond, but we could see only a little blue smoke rising above the undergrowth—for it was early spring and the green leaves were just beginning to appear—and hear the skipping of stray bullets through the branches with a whirr of spent force. A stir went through the lines and faces grew pale, for we knew that the battle was sweeping toward us and that these shots were the first sprinkle of the coming storm. The quiet command of “Attention!” was obeyed ere it was uttered; but the climax of first impressions came with the order to “load.” That order, like the jarring touch upon the chemist’s glass, crystallized the wild turmoil of thoughts and focalized all upon the actual business of war. I can realize now how important a thing in war is the musket as a steadying factor for overwrought nerves; and how that first order to “load!” brought the panicky thoughts of men back with a sudden shock to the realization that they were there upon equal terms with the enemy to do and not alone to suffer. I remember the “thud” of the muskets as they came down upon the ground almost as one,—for our men had been well drilled,—and the confused rattle of drawing ramrods, and their ring in the gun barrels as they rebounded in ramming the charges home. Every movement and every sound was an encouragement; and in the reaction of feeling the interchange of boastful speech almost ripened into cheers. But, meantime, the fire of skirmishers increased to an almost continuous rattle and grew closer, until—for all this was a matter of minutes only—our skirmishers could be seen coming in, firing as they came, and half carrying two or three wounded men. This, of course, again deepened the tension of nervous expectation, and faces took on a look of grim determination, as eyes peered forward to catch the first glimpse of the approaching enemy. As our skirmishers came into the lines, there went a hoarse whisper down the ranks, “There they are!”—and looking out through the woods I saw the flutter of battle flags and beneath them a surging line of butternut and gray moving rapidly across our front just beyond the shallow ravine, perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards away. In a moment, as it seemed, there burst forth a rattle of musketry that almost drowned the command of our officers to “fire at will!”