Heaven and Earth Seemed Collapsing: Under Fire at Harper's Ferry

With tomorrow marking the 158th anniversary of the surrender of Harper's Ferry, Virginia during the Civil War, I thought it would be appropriate to review a few scenes from the siege and surrender of the town.

 This account was originally published in the New York Evening Post and later republished in the Cleveland Morning Leader. We know a few things about the author: she was a civilian, a Unionist, and was residing in a house atop Camp Hill while the three guns of Captain John H. Graham's Company A, 5th New York Heavy Artillery thundered behind the garden. Company A had been raised in New York City so an account from the wife of one of the soldiers of the 5th New York is my best guess as to the identity of this correspondent. 
Maryland Heights across the Potomac from Harper's Ferry

 "Whiz! Whiz! Whiz! Whir, whir, whir! Hiss, hiss, hisssss! Bang, bang, bang! Roar, roar! Crash, smash! The Rebels batteries opened upon us together. The windows rattled, the house shook to its foundations. Heaven and earth seemed collapsing. The roar rolling back to the mountains died amid the deeper roar bursting from their summits. One of our batteries on Camp Hill was directly behind in the rear of the house behind the garden fence. The Rebel batteries on Loudon Heights faced us. Thus this loyal little domicile was under the heaviest fire. I intended to finish eating a piece of pie dancing on a plate before me, but the shock of the tremendous cannon behind the house sent me off my chair in defiance of my aspiration after sublime courage. I am not a hero, but I very much wish to be one, but am not. 

 With profound humility, I went down into the cellar to escape the earthquake. I concluded as a woman cannot command a battery, she should have the privilege of trying to save her head. We all went into the cellar. On a box sat a matron. I entrenched myself in a piano box, my amusement being the frequent opportunity which I enjoying of jumping out of it as a shell hissed or struck near the outside wall. There sat gray-haired old men, and sick a sick young man most frightened of all. Poor fellow, how he dodged about! Thus in all the cellars of the street above us cowered old age, innocent childhood, and helpless womanhood.
Captain John Hugh Graham
Co. A, 5th N.Y. Heavy Artillery

 I am afraid of bombshells. I am far more afraid of them than I was before I heard or felt their sulphurous current hissing very near my head. If there is a sound purely devilish this side the region of the damned, it is the scream and shriek of a bombshell. No matter how thickly they tear the air, each fiend of a shell persists in a diabolical individuality of its own, and never screams or hisses precisely like any one of its myriad neighbors. 

 This cannonading continued terrific, unremitting. The bombshells poured into the garden beside us, struck the pavement before us, tore the earth up on the cellar door, threw the scared soil into our upstairs windows, stunned us, but did not hit us. 

 On September 15, 1862, the Union garrison at Harper's Ferry surrendered to General Thomas J. Jackson's army. Shortly after the surrender, the Confederates started marching into town and this same female correspondent described their arrival.

 First came the cavalry, the flower, the chivalry, the aristocracy of the South, spurred and mounted like the knights of old, each man in his spirit and person repeating the princely crusader of the Middle Ages. They look like what they are: high-blooded, high-bred, infatuated men. Every eye burns and scintillates with passion and its very glitter is the ire of insanity. They ask only to win or die and unlike the infantry, they know what they are fighting for. 

 After these imperial leaders marched their slaves- their white slaves, true serfs, fighting in their rear for eternal serfdom which they are taught to believe is Southern rights. Never until I saw it with my own eyes did I believe all that I had read of the outward destitution and degradation of the Southern rank and file. Gather the scum of New York from her dirtiest dens, stretch it along the streets in its squalor and filth and wretchedness, and it would be a comely sight compared with that presented by the great army of the South. The tatters and the skin of the men are the color of the earth beneath their feet. Bare-footed, half-naked, foul, filling the air with unbearable stench, flouting their dirty banners, gazing eagerly about with half starved faces intent only on plunder and on finding something to eat. Thus the deliverers of Maryland entered Harper's Ferry.

Colonel Dixon S. Miles commanded the Federal garrison at Harper's Ferry, but was struck down as he was riding towards the Confederates to surrender the town. General Julius White actually signed the surrender terms which gave the Confederates 12,419 prisoners who they promptly paroled. 

 The rough appearance of Jackson's "foot cavalry" contrasted sharply with the appearance of many of the Federal troops, most of whom had just enlisted and had been in the army less than a month. William Mosby McLain of the 32nd Ohio described the dress of his captors as "their clothes were of all sorts, sizes, shapes, kinds, colors, and cuts. From the old short-waited jacket, so short indeed that it general exposed a zone of dirty shirt between wind and water giving one the idea that pants and coat were bound in different directions. I never dreamed that God's images could become so defaced: ragged, dirty, lousy, lean, haggard, hatless, shoeless, blanket-less, often bootless and shirtless for many of them had a strip torn from some old tent to serve in place of coat and short in the day and blanket at night. I don't believe there were a hundred good pairs of socks in the whole corps nor many more of shoes or boots."

 One of those new recruits cut to the heart of the matter though, writing to his sister that "the worst I can say of the Rebels is that they are a dirty, ragged, ignorant set of men, not one out of a hundred of whom can read or write his own name. All they know is fight, and that they understand to perfection."
Sources:
"A Lady's Feelings Under Bombardment," Cleveland Morning Leader, October 21, 1862, pg. 4
"The Rebel Reign at Harper's Ferry," Cleveland Morning Leader, November 6, 1862, pg. 1
Letter from Marcus Andrus of the 126th New York Volunteers, Geneva (New York) Daily Gazette, October 3, 1862, pg. 2
Masters, Daniel, editor. The Seneachie Letters: A Virginia Yankee with the 32nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Perrysburg: Columbian Arsenal Press, 2020, pgs. 105-106

Comments

Post a Comment

Most Popular Posts

Arming the Buckeyes: Longarms of the Ohio Infantry Regiments

Image
     A common question that comes up in conversation about Civil War Buckeye regiments is "What were they armed with?" We are fortunate in that the state of Ohio kept good records of how the regiments were armed when they went into service, this being especially true for those regiments which went into service in 1861 and 1862. The state adjutant general's reports for 1861 and 1862 have been heavily drawn upon to construct this article, as well as consultation with Phil Spaugy who has done extensive research on how Ohio's troops were armed during the war.      Buckeyes carried a fairly wide variety of weapons into the field, and the below article breaks this down into weapons of both domestic manufacture and imported arms. The early days of the war found the state of Ohio practically bereft of longarms; as an example, when the 1st and 2nd Ohio Volunteer Militia left the state in late April 1861, they left unarmed, being armed at Lancaster, Pennsylvania on their way to
Read more

Dressing the Rebels: How to Dye Butternut Jeans Cloth

Image
     In the early days of the Civil War,  the Southern states found themselves with an abundance of cotton but a shortage of cloth with which to make army uniforms. The trade in cloth prior to the war had largely been to send raw cotton or wool north to New England (or Great Britain) where it was converted into usable cloth; but now that trade was broken and the Southern states were thrown upon their own resources in their efforts to properly clothe the Confederate army.  This collection of Confederate enlisted men's frock coats and shell jackets gives some indication of the variety of shades of butternut worn during the war. All of them are shades of yellow brown, some heavier on the yellow and some heavier on the brown. The blue used around the collar or as rank insignia indicates that the soldier was in the infantry. Surviving Confederate uniforms are considered rather rare and command quite a healthy price in the collecting market. For an in-depth study of how Confederate jacke
Read more

Bullets for the Union: Manufacturing Small Arms Ammunition During the Civil War

Image
       Civil War bullets are perhaps the most common item collected from the era; the two armies expended bullets by the millions during the four years’ conflict and spent or deformed bullets of all shapes and sizes have made fascinating and affordable collectibles since the guns went silent in 1865.       I recently acquired a display piece featuring 35 different types of small arms ammunition used during the Civil War, including everything from a small .28 caliber ball up to a .69 caliber three-ring Minie and it triggered some questions: how did the Federal army obtain its small arms ammunition during the war? Where did the lead come from to make the bullets, and where and how was the ammunition manufactured? This post seeks to answer those questions. A typical .58 caliber 3-ring Minie bullet   “Whenever the blasts of war blow in the ears of men who trade in the implements of destruction, they are apt to experience more joy than the true warrior, for then comes the harvest of gain.
Read more

The Cannons are Now Silent: The Field of Death of Tupelo

Image
       The smoke of battle had drifted away from the battlefield at Tupelo, Mississippi on the hot afternoon of July 14, 1864, but the carnage of war lay spread across the open fields. “Scattered at intervals over the field of a few yards are dull gray blotches half shaded by grass,” an officer from the 7 th Minnesota Infantry recorded. “These are the Rebel dead. They have fought their last battle and lie generally in attitudes of rest; some of them look as if they had welcomed death. On the faces of two is imprinted a smile. One is a boy of 16 with delicate features, almost girlish in their beauty. His last gaze seems to have been directed toward his hand on the forefinger of which was a ring. A circle of purer white indicates its place; the ring was carried off as a trophy of the field.” The following account of the Battles of Tupelo and Old Town Creek was written by an unknown officer of the 7 th Minnesota Infantry, his account appearing in the August 5 th 1864 edition of the
Read more

The Vaunted Enfield Rifle Musket

Image
     The English-made Model 1853 .577 caliber Enfield Rifle Musket was widely regarded as the best infantry arm in the world at the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. Favorable international press describing its efficiency in the Crimean War and in suppressing the Indian rebellion led to the widespread desire of American infantrymen (both Federal and Confederate) to be armed with these accurate and well-made arms. The lock plate of this well-worn P1853 Enfield rifle musket produced in 1862 shows the typical markings of a British-made weapon that made it through the Federal blockade.  ( Army of Tennessee Relics ) Enfield-pattern weapons were imported into the states by the tens and hundreds of thousands during the war years; one estimate stated that the Federal government purchased 500,000 while the Confederates purchased another 400,000. The Confederate government dispatched Captain Caleb Huse to Europe in April 1861 to purchase weapons and Huse focused on securing all the Enfi
Read more

Straw Already Threshed: Sherman on Shiloh

Image
  W illiam Tecumseh Sherman was enjoying retired life in New York City when just before Christmas in 1889 he was presented with an article written by John Cockerill, a former drummer boy in the 24 th Ohio who was visiting his father Colonel Joseph Cockerill of the 70 th Ohio of Sherman’s division when the Battle of Shiloh began. Cockerill’s article, originally published in the New York Journalist and later featured in the January 1893 issue of Blue & Gray Magazine, Sherman later pronounced as “the best war story ever written” and the truest account of Shiloh.           On New Year’s Day 1890, General Sherman composed the following letter to his friend Marshall P. Wilder thanking him for sending along Cockerill’s article and giving his own explanation of Shiloh. “This to me is straw already threshed for we have fought this battle on paper several times, a much more agreeable task than to fight with bullets,” he concluded. “When in England some years ago I was gratified to liste
Read more

Federal Arms in the Stones River Campaign

Image
  T he following list, constructed after many years of research, lists unit by unit which type of weapons were carried by the Army of the Cumberland during the Stones River campaign. A number of sources were consulted including state ordnance reports, Federal quarterly ordnance reports (thank you Research Arsenal ), Ken Baumann’s Arming the Suckers, regimental histories and memoirs, captured ordnance reports, and consultation with knowledgeable experts in the field of firearms. Some of this information has been shared on the blog before in “ Rosy’s Heavy Metal: Artillery of the Army of the Cumberland ” or “ Shoulder Arms: How Sheridan’s and Davis’s Divisions Were Armed at Stones River ” but this is the first time the army as a whole has been presented. The overall conclusion I drew from looking at this data is that the Army of the Cumberland in December 1862 was an organization in the midst of transformation as far as arms. Many of the regiments still retained their original issue
Read more

Escape of Captain Henry H. Alban of the 21st Ohio Infantry

Image
Captain Henry H. Alban was among the dozen officers of the 21 st Ohio Volunteer Infantry who were captured on September 20, 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga. The regiment had held its position atop Snodgrass Hill against repeated Confederate assaults and now battered and without ammunition, with the darkness of evening enveloping the hill, the remainder of that gallant band found themselves at the mercy of the 54 th Virginia. A total of 12 officers and 121 enlisted men surrendered; the regiment’s colors were taken, and the men marched off the field into captivity. Captain Henry Harvey Alban, Co. F, 21st O.V.I. Captain Alban along with the rest went through a series of Confederate prison camps before arriving at Columbia, South Carolina in October 1864. Determined to make an escape, he watched for his chance and one night made his leap for freedom, successfully eluding the local camp guard and setting out along the railroad to head for the mountains of eastern Tennessee and
Read more

Knapsack Compression: Wilbur Hinman recalls the first step of becoming a veteran

Image
L ooking back on his experiences during the war, Captain Wilbur Hinman of the 65 th Ohio (perhaps best known as the author of Si Klegg and His Pard ) recalled that the first road along which his regiment marched was strewn “with debris. A pair of six-mule wagonloads might have been gathered of notions that had been flung aside by a thousand suffering “tenderfeet.” “The average young patriot started for the war with a wheelbarrow load of clothing, a bed quilt or two, books, photograph albums, toilet articles, and gimcracks of every sort,” he wrote. “Neither he nor the good homefolks had the slightest conception of the capacity of a knapsack, nor did they for a moment imagine that before the close of his first day upon the road every pound he carried would seem a hundred.” To the true mark of a veteran soldier was one who “learned to dispense with every unnecessary ounce of weight, and just in the ratio that he did this he increased his efficiency as a soldier. It was of the highest
Read more

Federal Arms in the Chickamauga Campaign

Image
T he ordnance returns of the Army of the Cumberland at the end of September 1863 show the results of a transformational year in weaponry. Since taking command of the army at the end of October 1862, General William S. Rosecrans had repeatedly pestered the War Department to supply his regiments with better firearms both to improve the command’s efficiency as well as expand its striking power. The results speak for themselves: for the infantrymen at the end of September 1863, 90% of them now carried Class I long arms (36,058 out of 39,959), 8.3% carried Class II arms, and a mere 1.5% carried Class III weapons. Most of the foreign-made weapons (except Enfields) were gone, and by and large the army had settled on a single common .58 caliber ammunition, although a few .54 caliber and .69 caliber weapons remained within the ranks. The English-made Enfield rifle musket was by far the most common arm, carried by 56% of the men while the second-most common arm was the .58 caliber M1861 Spring
Read more