What Next? (Lincoln's Question to Hooker)

This entry a letter from Abraham Lincoln  to General J. Hooker.  Hooker has just lost 11,000 men in the Battle of Chancellorsville.

May 7, 1863

MY DEAR SIR:--The recent movement of your army is ended without effecting its object, except, perhaps, some important breakings of the enemy's communications.  What next? If possible, I would be very glad of another movement early enough to give us some benefit from the fact of the enemy's communication being broken; but neither for this reason nor any other do I wish anything done in desperation or rashness. An early movement would also help to supersede the bad moral effect of the recent one, which is said to be considerably injurious. Have you already in your mind a plan wholly or partially formed? If you have, prosecute it without interference from me. If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try and assist in the formation of some plan for the army.

Yours as ever, A. LINCOLN.

Major General Joseph Hooker
Library of Congress

Yours as ever, A. LINCOLN.

Charging the Swamp (Battle of the Wilderness)

From All For the Union, The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes

May 6, 1864 (Battle of the Wilderness)

. . . . Our brigade charged into the swamp six times, and each time were driven out.  Darkness again put an end to the fighting, and we lay down amid the dead and wounded.  During the night the brush caught fire, and many of the wounded burned to death.  . . .

 Wounded escaping from the burning woods of the Wilderness by Alfred R. Waud
From Library of Congress Collection

The Rocking Chair

This entry is from Letters from a Surgeon of the Civil War compiled by Martha Derby Perry.  They are letters of John G. Perry, surgeon with the 20th Massachusetts

May 5th, 1863, Falmouth, VA.  Perry was in Fredericksburg at the time of this incident.

I had to run the gauntlet many times, and on one of my expeditions heard a woman's piercing screams from a house by the way. I rushed in, and found an elderly woman of immense size in a violent fit of hysterics. She was seated in a rocking-chair, swaying back and forth, evidently beside herself with terror, screaming, moaning, and crying.

While I did what I could in the hurry of the moment to reassure the poor thing, a shell came whizzing through the air above, exploding as it fell into the square in front of us. Over went the old woman backwards, turning a complete somersault, chair and all.

For a moment there was a convulsion of arms and legs, and then such shrieks that it seemed to me the din outside was nothing to that within. I gathered her together as quickly as I could, — it was difficult to find any particular part to hold on to, — and when she had wit and breath enough to answer, asked for the other inmates of the house; vague and muffled sounds told me they were near, and when she pointed with her finger downwards, sure enough, I found them in the cellar huddled together, both whites and negroes.

It seemed that the old woman was too large to manage the cellar stairs, and they, supposing from all the uproar that she was killed, were every moment expecting a like fate for themselves. However, they soon ventured up, and I hurried back to my hospital.

John C Perry, from Frontispiece of the book

With the Alligators

This entry is from Brother of Mine, The Civil War Letters of Thomas and William Christie, edited by Hampton Smith.

William and Thomas Christie were half brothers, 13 years apart in age.  They served in the same Regiment,  the 1st Minnesota.

May 4th 1863, Smith's Plantation. Louisiana (near Vicksburg) - Thomas

Four hundred and fifty of the prisoners taken at Port Gibson passed our camp this evening under guard . . . As they marched past, all the men of our Division lined the road on both sides.  Both prisoners and we were in great good humor; many a joke flew back and forth between us.  It is due to our men to say that not an insulting word was spoken.  One well-dressed Texan in conversation with one of our boys inadvertently used the word "Yankees" in speaking of us.  He instantly corrected himself, and with a graceful bow begged our pardon.  "We do not consider you Western gentlemen to be Yankees."  One of our fellows replied laughingly, "I think you will find that although we are Western men we have Yankee principles!"  "Boys," said one of them, "we are going North.  but  you will have to stay here with the alligators!"  Indeed no one would have thought in hearing the talk that we were enemies."

Three Confederate prisoners (Gettysburg) from Library of Congress Collection

Coming Home

From Letters of a War Correspondent by Charles A. Page, Special Correspondent of the New York "Tribune" during the Civil War

May 3, 1865,  Springfield, Illinois

. . . .The train that brought him to his long home, moved slowly into the town, moved slowly through the masses of "plain people" who had come from all the country round about. These people had known him always as the boy struggling for knowledge while he battled with poverty; as the young man who surveyed their lands, and read all night, when perchance he stayed at their humble houses ; as the rising young lawyer who pleaded the causes of the poor for " only sweet pity's sake," who upheld the weak against the strong for only justice's sake, and because oppression was hateful to him ; as the politician whose continual plea was: "Let us see if this thing be right; if it be right let us have it, but if it be wrong let us put it away from us;" as the State legislator who, with one other, against an intolerant majority dared to file upon the records his protest against slavery; as the Presidential Elector who each four years spoke his convictions in every town in the State, though in a hopeless minority, for conscience' sake, and yet never lost his temper or called bad names ; as the candidate for senator who deliberately said, "I will not be double-faced, I will utter the same opinions at both ends of the State, I will not be made Senator by a fraud." And by and by he was made President and went from among them ; and they, watching from afar, were proud that one of themselves had become, in virtue and in station, " the foremost man of all this world."

Solitude

This entry is from Mary Chesnut's Civil War, edited by C. Van Woodward

May 2, 1865 (Camden, SC, from the roadside below Blackstock)

Since we left Chester -- solitude. Nothing but tall blackened chimneys to show that any man ever trod this road before us.

This is Sherman's track. It is hard not to curse him.

I wept incessantly at first. "The roses of these gardens are already hiding the ruins, " said Mr. C. "Nature is a wonderful renovator." He tried to say something.


Then I shut my eyes and made a vow. If we are a crushed people, crushed by aught, I have vowed never to be a whimpering pining slave.

From the book A Diary from Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut

The Yankees are Coming!

From:  Diary of a Refugee, edited by Frances Hewitt Fearn  (This is her mother’s diary)  Her mother resided on a Plantation near New Orleans before becoming a refugee.

Thurs, May [1,] 1862

My son's news of the fall of New Orleans was confirmed while we were at breakfast by a man on horseback, riding rapidly down the Bayou road, calling out as he went by, "The Yankees are coming!"  It was the signal for us to gather up the things we most valued of our belongings and to go on board "The Lafourche," which was waiting with steam up in the Bayou, fronting the house, to carry us off.

"The Writer of the Diary"