On this date in 1863 ...

I’ve always liked the story of how some Union soldiers found Lee’s battle plans right before the Battle of Antietam, wrapped in some cigars. The fun part is that nobody knows what happened to the cigars afterward.

 

Looking him up now, and the first thing that strikes me of Devil Dan was that he was elected to two terms of Congress, 36 years apart.

 

That’s the second most famous cigar story in US History.

 

"I've always thought the Yankees had something to do with it." -- George Pickett

 

I'd try to put together a definitive list, but I'm sure I'd blow it.

 

The ill-fated assassination attempt on Fidel has to be up there.

 

I assume you're familiar with Ty Seidule's Robert E Lee and Me?

Southerner, born in Virginia worshiping RE Lee, went on to spend 35 years in the army and two decades teaching history at West Point.

He had some interesting arguments about post-war feelings. It's great that countrymen got along better and shook hands at Gettysburg. There's no shortage of similar stories about Americans and Japanese, or Americans and Germans, or Americans and Vietnamese. There's probably a lot to be learned from what the old men who were there consider important in their waning days.

But former-Union officers also fought hard to keep former-Confederate officers from having any memorial or anything else of note at West Point, for instance. That stuff, and most of the fort naming and whatnot, didn't start to creep in until they were long gone. Surely they shook some hands but it was never all peachy keen for those guys. It's easy to wave away as being 160 years ago, but man, it never ceases to amaze me how little I have to dig on Twitter or Facebook to realize it isn't. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that, considering where you live.

 

Yet the only two people charged after the war were a guerrilla who even the South wanted dead and the commandant of Andersonville who was a scapegoat. The #2 general in the a confederate army was appointed to positions in the presidential administration of the top union commander.

 

On the first three days of July 1863, the North and South battered at each other before the Southerners broke and ran for home. On the fourth day of the month, the North won the war — not at Gettysburg, but at Vicksburg.

That “fortress town” on the Mississippi River was the last one on that river that the United States had not taken. At 10 a.m. July 4, the Federals celebrated their country’s birthday when 29,000 Confederates — over 3,000 less than their total casualties from the siege — marched out of their lines, stacked their rifles and furled their flags.

Without food or supplies, the Confederate soldiers and civilians inside the Union lines were starving. Confederate soldiers had seized civilians’ meat and vegetables, and those civilians had resorted to slaughtering mules, cats and other animals to survive. Eventually, the civilians abandoned their homes, as noted by Grant following the surrender:

…I found that many of the citizens had been living under ground. The ridges upon which Vicksburg is built, and those back to the Big Black, are composed of a deep yellow clay of great tenacity. Where roads and streets are cut through perpendicular banks are left and stand as well as if composed of stone. The magazines of the enemy were made by running passage-ways into this clay at places where there are deep cuts. Many citizens secured places of safety for their families by carving rooms in these embankments…. Some of these were carpeted and furnished with considerable elaboration. In these the occupants were fully secure from the shells of the navy, which were dropped into the city night and day without interruption.​

This cut the Confederacy in half, with Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas on the “wrong” side of the line.

This is the victory that led Lincoln to replace George Meade with Ulysses Grant as the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

The Federals’ victory at Gettysburg was the end of the beginning. Their victory at Vicksburg was the beginning of the end.

 

I’m reading part one of Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy and have been for like three years lol. Reading about military maneuvers and campaigns is some laborious work, albeit rewarding.

 

The prewar US Army was very small, and a large number of its leading officers, Union and Confederate, had personal relationships before being on opposite sides of the war (Grant and Longstreet for example. So if those friendships survived the conflict, it's not entirely surprising. As for the 1913 reunion, this was a primitive photo-up, and I daresay the veterans on both sides were the ones willing to do it. Those who weren't probably stayed away from such events.

 

One day I will take on Lee's Lieutenants, by Douglas Southall Freeman. He's an alum of my alma mater but they've taken his name off of a dorm there because he was a big believer in eugenics. He still has a high school up on Three Chopt named in his honor, though.