Tufts University maintains a wonderful resource consisting of the digitalized Richmond Times Dispatch for the entire civil war years, running from November 1860, just prior to the election of President Lincoln, to April, 1865 and the fall of Richmond. Each day's newspaper gives you a snapshot of life in the Confederacy, at least from the point of view of the strongly secessionist white editors of the paper.
"Bottom rail top" -- 1864 Point Lookout
sketch, by a Confederate POW.
The issue of
Tuesday, March 8, 1864 includes a report on the recent release of Confederate prisoners of war from the Union prison cape at Point Lookout, Maryland.
Some folks these days want to characterize Point Lookout as the Andersonville of the North, or even "genocidal" (see here for an example), but the prisoners released in March 1864 reported, at least according to the Times-Dispatch, that their treatment had been good.
Still, they provided a list of recent deaths among the prisoners who and reported on the arrival of a prominent Confederate officer, West Point graduate), Col J. Lucius Davis.(1817-1871). They also noted that a "regiment of negroes" had been added to the guard.
This brings us to one of the great archival treasures of the civil war, which are the Point Lookout sketches John T. Omenhausser, a Confederate soldier captured at Petersburg in June 1864 and held at Point Lookout for most of the next year. Omenhausser's sketches were colored, probably with materials supplied by his friends in the north (he was a recent immigrant from Austria). One his sketches (at right) showsarmed African-American guard saying to a Confederate prisoner:
Git away from dat dar fence white man or I make Old Abe's gun smoke at you. I can hardly hold de ball back now. De bottom rail's on top now
The idea of an armed black man, anywhere, in this country or elsewhere -- anywhere in the world -- guarding a white man, much less threatening to shoot him, had up until then been completely unheard of.
"Slaves waiting for sale", by Eyre Crowe (1824-1910),
based on sketch done in 1853.
Slavery is often associated plantations and rural life in the south, but in fact by the time of the Civil War, slaves played a major role in that south's industrial, and thereafter, war economy.
Imagine all the work you see nowadays done by construction and farm equipment being done instead by slaves, and you might have some idea of slavery's role in the Southern economy. The entire goal of slavery was to squeeze out of a man or a woman the entire value of his or her's lifetime of labor.
Necessarily incident to this was the need to deny, or at least disparage, the humanity of the slave. The painting by the British artist, Eyre Crowe (right), which shows the slaves in focus, as unique persons, and the whites in the background, almost as shadows, was itself a revolutionary document.
Lincoln's justification for the emancipation proclamation was that it was strickly a war measure, that is, that slavery was a war resource for the south. The Richmond Times-Dispatch for March 8, 1864 provides strong evidence not only for the role that slavery played in the Confederate war effort, but to the need to dehumanize enslaved persons, done by multiple means, including permitting them only first names:
Ranaway
--From the gravel train on Sunday, 28th ult, four negroes, named Ned, Frederick, Efford, and Albert, hired of Mrs A C Isbell, of Cumberland county. Efford and Albert are of a bright gingerbread color, 5 feet 10 inches high; Ned and Frederick are of dark complexion, stout, 5 feet 7 inches high. The usual reward will be paid for their apprehension
C G Talcott,
Supt Richmond and Danville R R mh 8--ts
Ned, Frederick Efford and Albert weren't the stereotypical contented agricultural workers living at
Tara. You might recall the lyrics from an old song by
The Band:
Virgil Caine is my name, and I rode on the Danville train,
'Till Stoneman's cavalry came, and tore up the tracks again.
Well, this is that railroad. The
Richmond and Danville railroad was a critical supply route into Richmond, and further allowed the products of Richmond's industry to be transported out to the rest of the Confederacy.
These railroad workers did substantial damage to the Confederacy simply by walking away. Note that they'd been leased to the railroad from their owner, quite possibly through a broker, perhaps the notorious Robert Lumpkin.
Ulric Dahlgren, Union fanatic who hanged or more
accurately,lynched an African-American guide.
The March 8, issue of the Richmond Daily-Times also reported that the previous Sunday, March 6, 1864, a body, reputed that of Union Col. Ulric Dahlgren, killed on March 2, 1864, had been
brought into the city. This was linked to the
Dahlgren raid or the Dahlgren papers.
Supposedly a plan to use Union cavalry to capture Richmond and free Union prisoners of war, documents found on Dahlgren's body apparently showed the real purpose of the raid was to kill Jefferson Davis.
Dahlgren, the youngest full colonel in the Union Army, and who had lost a leg at Gettysburg, has come down in history as a fanatic, largely due to the report, apparently true, that he had ordered during the raid that a guide, a free black man named Martin Robinson, be hanged for misdirecting his column.
And there were such fanatics in the Union army -- Dahlgren, a man raised in privilege, was one, Jayhawker colonel James Montgomery, an associate of John Brown's from Brown's days in Kansas as a murderer, was another. Montgomery was accurate quoted in the 1989 film Glory as stating: "Secesh has got to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old." Given this sort of thing, it's not surprising that resistance in the south continued long past the point where the war presented any chance of a victory.
When four black soldiers were captured during the course of the Dahlgren raid operations, the March 8, 1864 Richmond Times-Dispatch reported:
Negro soldiers.
--Four negro soldiers, dressed in full United States uniforms, were brought to this city and lodged in the Libby prison on Sunday night last. These negroes were captured on the 2d of March, near Williamsburg, and were attached to Butler's infantry command, who were on their way to cover Col. Dahlgren's retreat. Maj. Turner, in command of the prisoners in this city, very properly placed them in the same cells in which the officers captured among the raiders were confined. The following are their names: Privates Jas W Corn, co C, 5th U S vols; P F Lowis, co I, 5th U S volge R P Armistead, co H, 6th U S vols; John Thomas, co H, 6th U S vols.
Here we see the transformational nature of the war. The enlistment of the black man as a soldier forced even the south to recognize his right to a full name. And unlike the four railroad workers, the possession of a name means these four soldiers are not fully lost to history. For example, Private Jas. W. Corn, Co. C, is certainly the same man as
James W. Corne. R.P. Armistead, Co. H, 6 U.S. Vols, is very likely
Richard C. Armstead, Co. H., 6 U.S. Colored Infantry, who entered as a private and was mustered out as a corporal.