William J. Hardee remained a competent but uninspired corps commander, nicknamed “Old Reliable” by his troops. He could not abide Bragg and was instrumental in having him relieved after the Battle of Chattanooga. After the war, Hardee decided to become a planter in Alabama where, in 1873, he died, and is buried in Selma.
John Cabell Breckinridge continued to serve in the Rebel army but like so many others he developed an intense distaste for Bragg, who returned the favor by accusing the 14th Vice President of the United States of being a drunkard. Ultimately Breckinridge got himself assigned to the eastern theater and performed creditably for Lee’s army before resigning his commission in early 1865 to become Confederate secretary of war. After the surrender Breckinridge fled the country, first to Cuba, then England, and then to Canada, until the talk of hanging important Confederate officials died down, when he returned to Lexington, Kentucky, and resumed his law practice, resisting efforts by others to have him again run for office. He vehemently opposed the Ku Klux Klan and became president of a railroad before his end came, in 1875, from cirrhosis of the liver.
The Irish general Pat Cleburne went on after Shiloh to become known as the “Stonewall of the West,” commanding a division through all of the heavy fighting. In 1864, however, he provoked the animosity of many in the high command by circulating a paper recommending that slaves be made into Confederate soldiers in exchange for their freedom. Cleburne had calculated that unless this was done the South would simply run out of manpower by 1864 or 1865. The suggestion proved so outrageous that it prompted the Rebel general Robert Toombs of Georgia, who had been the Confederacy’s first secretary of state, to declare indignantly, “If slaves can be made into soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
In the final year of the war, Jefferson Davis at last came around to Cleburne’s way of thinking and slaves were offered positions in the Confederate army. When Toombs raised his objection again, Davis countered with his own declaration, stating, “If the Confederacy dies, then its tombstone should read: ‘Died of a Theory.’ ”
Many think that Cleburne’s impolitic slavery proposal was responsible for his rising no higher than division commander instead of being given a corps, or even an army. It may also have been his death warrant, since corps and army commanders are not nearly so exposed to fire as generals commanding divisions and brigades.
Not long after the Battle of Atlanta Cleburne found himself riding north in middle Tennessee toward a rendezvous with the Yankee army at the terrible Battle of Franklin. When they passed by Ashwood, near Columbia, ancestral home of Leonidas Polk’s family, Cleburne noticed a lovely ivy-covered brick Episcopal chapel on the property and remarked to one of his staff that “The church is so beautiful that to be buried there would almost be worth dying for.” Next afternoon Cleburne, along with four other Rebel generals, were slain on the field at Franklin, and soon enough Pat Cleburne got his wish of being laid to rest in the cemetery of the lovely brick chapel at Ashwood, Tennessee.2
Nathan Bedford Forrest survived the war but no one knows how. One of his staff remarked that he fights “as if he courts death.” He soon gained his own large cavalry command in the West and outfoxed his Yankee opposition at almost every turn, causing Jefferson Davis in his memoirs to lament that he did not realize just how great a general Forrest was until nearly the end of the war. His reputation was tarnished, however, by the infamous slaughter by his troops of black soldiers during the Battle of Fort Pillow on the Tennessee River in April 1864.
At war’s end, Forrest dismissed his command with a brief farewell speech in which he told them, “You have been good soldiers, you can be good citizens.” In the first year after the war, however, Forrest joined the newly organized Ku Klux Klan, rising to its leadership until the Klan’s activities became so obnoxious to him that in 1869 he issued an order for the society to disband itself, which it did.3 He became a Presbyterian, returned to farming, and died peacefully in his bed in 1877 at the age of 56.
Colonel David Stuart, whose Illinoisans held so bravely on the Union left at Shiloh, could never escape the adultery scandal that embroiled him in Chicago. He went on with Grant to fight at Vicksburg and on Grant’s personal recommendation was nominated to brigadier general by President Lincoln, which at least to Stuart’s mind would have vindicated him. But Chicago politics and vengeful social connections had a long political reach, and his nomination was denied by Congress, prompting Stuart to resign from the army in 1863. Grant, furious, lambasted the politicians who were responsible, but to no avail. Unable to fulfill his promise of taking his brigade to get drunk in New Orleans, Stuart instead opened a law practice in Detroit, where he died in 1868 at the age of 52.
Six months after Shiloh, William Camm of the 14th Illinois, whom we first met at Fort Donelson over the body of the beautiful dead Confederate boy, returned to Winchester, Illinois, and married his hometown sweetheart, Miss Kitty Mason, who produced a child that died in infancy, followed by her own death in 1864.
Afterward Camm became a kind of Renaissance man, teaching, writing, painting—at which he was accomplished4—and dabbling in the quasi-socialist philosophy of Henry George, the “single-tax” man. In 1865 he remarried, fathered five children, and died in 1906 at the age of 69.
Of our correspondents in the front lines, Private Henry Morton Stanley, after his capture by the Yankees, was consigned to the dismal Camp Douglas near Chicago, where dead Confederate prisoners were carted off daily by the wagonload, and himself nearly died of disease, before talking his way out by enlisting in the U.S. Navy, from which he deserted as soon as possible. Stanley made his way back to his native Wales, only to have his mother disown him at the doorstep. Without resources, he managed to make a career as an explorer during the age of the great African explorations and began a lucrative business enterprise by selling accounts of his exploits to newspapers. In 1869 James Gordon Bennett, Jr., of the New York Herald employed him exclusively to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had gone to Africa in 1866 and not been heard from since. Stanley found him in 1871, living happily in what is now Tanzania, which, almost overnight, made Stanley a world hero. In 1899 he was knighted in London, where he died five years later, one of the most prominent, and most controversial,5 of the 19th-century explorers.
Ambrose Bierce fought the war to the end and was discharged with the rank of major. He settled afterward in San Francisco, where he became one of America’s most prominent (and cynical) authors. His most distinguished works had roots in his experiences in the Civil War, including the story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” whose title, at least, probably comes from the Shiloh battle. Some of his books still remain popular in print, including the acerbic Devil’s Dictionary. In December 1913 Bierce disappeared into the chaos of the Mexican revolution and was never heard from again.
Another who gained notoriety as a journalist was 16-year-old musician fourth class John A. Cockerill, who after the war established himself prominently at midwestern newspapers before becoming editor in chief of Joseph Pulitzer’s sensational New York World. Other diarists or memoirists attained rank; Pvt. Robert H. Fleming, for instance, who was wounded and found his way to the hospital boat only to discover his dying brother was aboard, became a captain before the war ended. (His older brother died in his arms while the Monday battle raged, and even in the confusion Fleming somehow persuaded the boat’s carpenter to cobble together a rude coffin, in which he buried his brother in a proper grave that he dug himself atop the bluff instead of in the common pit where the Union slain were laid.)
Almost immediately word began to filter back north, far from the gunfire and the madding crowd at Shiloh, that a great battle was in progress along the Tennessee River. It reached Bowling Green, Kentucky, and 21-year-old Josie Underwood’s family on April 6, while the first day’s slaughter was still in progress, but details were sparse until the following week, when the fuller picture was drawn. On that Sunday, April 6, Josie wrote in her diar
y, “We are horribly uneasy. There were rumors today of a big battle. If there was, all we love on both sides must be in it. God have mercy and stop this cruel war—I pray—”
By April 15 there was definite confirmation: “The rumor is true!” Josie wrote. “Oh, the horror of it! Every soul I know on either side was in that battle!”
Josie’s 15-year-old brother Warner had received a bad gunshot wound in his arm while wearing Yankee blue. He staggered home still in uniform, the right coat sleeve split in two and wrapped in bandages that had been applied on the battlefield. Josie tried to dress his gash, she said, but “When I unwound the dirty bandages—maggots fell out, and the wound itself was full of them and stunk so—it nearly knocked me down.” It was hard, she said, to keep from fainting, and all Warner would say was, “God pity the poor fellows who are wounded so much worse and can’t come home.”
As more reports of the battle came in Josie’s mother, who at the first hint of trouble had imprudently gone on a steamboat to Pittsburg Landing to look for Warner, told of “much indignation against Gen. Grant. Instead of being on the field or wherever [he] should have been, he was on a boat drunk—and but for Buell’s army reaching there by forced marches, the result of the battle would have been a terrible defeat for Union army.” These were the first impressions of Josie’s mother upon arriving at Pittsburg Landing.
“The feeling between the rebel and Union people gets bitterer, and bitterer as the war goes on,” Josie lamented. “Lizzy Wright sits on her front porch across the street and I on ours and merely the coldest bows and never a visit now.”
A few days later came news that Josie’s favorite cousin, Jack Henry, had been killed at Shiloh fighting as a captain with the Memphis Grays. His brother Gus got there in time to have him die in his arms. Jack Henry had been a close friend and law partner of Tom Grafton and was the one who had arranged the little charade on Josie’s last night in Memphis so that she and Grafton could say goodbye alone. “A nobler, sweet soul never entered Heaven,” Josie told her diary, “no matter how wrong the cause for which he died, he believed in it—to him it was sacred. Oh! The crime of the men on both sides. Fanatics North and South who brought about this cruel war.”
More friends turned up wounded but at least springtime took hold. Numerous homes and buildings in Bowling Green had been turned into hospitals, and the city continued to be garrisoned by Union soldiers. Josie resumed her late afternoon rides over the fields of Mount Air, surrounding the charred remains of the plantation house. “I haven’t heard a word from Tom Grafton since the Confederates left Bowling Green,” she wrote on May 9, 1862, a month after the battle. “At first I thought it well, since by other means I could not find it in my heart to forbid his writing. Today I would give anything for one of his letters.”
Summer came. Josie’s father and his friend Congressman Grider managed to see that brother Warner received an appointment to West Point, which ensured that he would be out of the war for at least the foreseeable future. Josie worried about the family finances. “Pa’s law practice is all broken up,” she said, and the slaves at Mount Air “hardly make enough for their own living.”
Then, for a change, fortune seemed to smile on the Underwoods. Despite his fierce opposition to Lincoln’s election, Josie’s father was appointed as U.S. consul to Glasgow, Scotland. They would leave for Washington at once, and Josie was going along as well. Lincoln, through the Kentucky politicians Henry Grider and John Crittenden, had been made aware of the Underwoods’ misfortune, and the President told Josie’s father that he had serious concerns about the warships the Scots were building for the Confederate navy on the river Clyde. He said that for the U.S. consul he “wanted a good lawyer—a strong Presbyterian and a Southern Union man, and that Pa fit the bill,” Josie wrote.
While they were in the capital city Josie met and mixed with the crème de la crème of Washington society. On the first day, she was introduced to the Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, and Lincoln’s future judge advocate general of the army Joseph Holt, and there were senators, congressmen, and generals galore. On the second day she even met President Lincoln himself, by accident, when he was out riding near the White House. “He was on a long-tailed black pony (the horse looked so small) galloping along—a high silk hat on his head—black cloth suit on, the long coat tails flying behind him.”
Lincoln stopped as Josie’s father pulled up the carriage they were riding in. (Her father had known Lincoln previously in Congress.) The President “leaned over, shook hands with us,” Josie said, “then slouched down on one side of the saddle, as any old farmer would do, and talked for about ten or 15 minutes with us.” Josie thought the President was “a very common-looking man … but I must confess there was a kindliness in his face.”
The rest of her visit was like a tale from a storybook. Josie met a prince and a princess, was nearly mixed up in a duel, and became the object of (an unsuccessful) seduction by an infamous ladies’ man. By the end of July she was home again, awaiting her father’s confirmation as U.S. consul. “All my life,” she wrote in her diary, “I have longed to go to Europe. Now, Oh! How I hate to go so far away.”
She and her mother again got into difficulty with the authorities for bringing food to prisoners—only this time it was with Union authorities over Confederate prisoners captured at Shiloh. Josie and her mother felt sorry for them, and had brought them some pies and cakes, when “a little upstart of an officer came up to me with a smirk,” Josie said, and warned her to “be careful giving aid and comfort to rebels”—to which she “replied in a flash—when I wish advice I will seek it from my friends.”
The summer of 1862 slipped away. Her cousin Winston was wounded serving with Stonewall Jackson in Virginia; her sister had a baby and the good news was sent through Union lines to her brother-in-law William Western, who was commanding a cavalry battalion with Bedford Forrest. Then on September 3 a letter came.
“Tom Grafton dead! Killed!” She fairly shrieked it out.
“At [the Battle of] Fair Oaks, near Richmond. A bursting shell—Oh! It is too horrible! ‘No one in the world to grieve if I should die,’ he said. Ah! Tom Grafton—how mistaken you were.”
A week later Josie packed her diary in the trunk that would carry it to Scotland. “All our friends have been coming here to-day to say good bye. Who knows when or how we will meet again.” The family sailed for Great Britain a few days later but Josie never resumed her journal.
When the war ended they returned to Bowling Green but life was not kind. Union soldiers had carried off all the livestock at Mount Air and practically everything else, including a large and valuable storage of wood and 35,000 bricks from the burned home that Underwood had salvaged in contemplation of building a new house. He sold off portions of the land and tried to resume his law practice but suffered a stroke in 1868 and died four years later. Somehow the remainder of Mount Air was lost, and in 1870 Josie married a New Yorker named Charles Nazro who started a bank in Bowling Green that soon failed. They then moved to Ballston Spa, New York, near Saratoga Springs, where Nazro obtained a low-paying office job. Though they lived in rented properties and were always short of money, during the next ten years Josie bore four children—two boys and two girls—and in 1889 the family drifted west, first to Denver then to San Diego where, in 1898, her husband died.
Afterward, Josie returned to live out the rest of her years in Bowling Green, where she relied on the kindness of friends and relatives and became active in literary and community organizations. She doubtless visited Mount Air but left no record of it and died in 1923. Among her meager possessions was the journal she kept from 1860 to 1862, which she willed to her 18-year-old granddaughter in Texas. There were only a few notations in Josie’s diary following the death of Tom Grafton in 1862, but at the very last is a verse of poetry, the entry undated, a stanza from “Adieu,” by Thomas Carlyle, as follows:
The saddest tears must fall, must fall,
The saddest tears must fall;
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In weal or woe, in this world below,
I’ll love thee ever and all,
My dear,
I will love thee ever and all.
The casualties of the Civil War of course weren’t limited to the battlefield. Everywhere, North and South, the conflict cast a long and tragic shadow. Millions were affected and scarcely a home was untouched. It has been estimated that Civil War casualties, if measured by a percentage of today’s U.S. population, would exceed 50 million, with 10 million of that number dead. Yet the toll of accumulated human suffering by the Josie Underwoods of the era remains incalculable.
1 Situated in dense terrain with little access to running water, antebellum Corinth could at best muster about 2,000 residents. The concentration of the Rebel army suddenly swelled this population to more than 70,000 with the arrival at last of Van Dorn’s men from Arkansas. With warm weather coming it became one of the most unhealthy places on Earth.
2 Ashwood is better known as Mount Pleasant, Tennessee. After the war Cleburne’s remains were removed to his adopted state of Arkansas.
3 In the early 1920s a second Klan arose and was active throughout the South and the Midwest. After World War II a third incarnation of the Klan surfaced during the civil rights movement.
4 Among his work is an 1858 oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which was painted from actual sittings by the future President.
5 He was said to shoot natives with the same cavalier abandon that he shot monkeys.
CHAPTER 17
AN EXALTED DISTINCTION