During the Fall of 2019, a handful of first-year Gettysburg College students traveled down to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. to conduct primary source research into a group of Civil War soldiers whose “dog tags” now reside in the collections of the Texas Civil War Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. This post is the second in a short series highlighting the stories of the men who wore these unique identification tags into battle. For a short history of military identification tags, or “dog tags,” check out Savannah Labbe’s (’18) 2016 article on the evolution of the dog tag.
Many thanks to Ray Richie, President of the Texas Civil War Museum, for his generosity in sharing these fascinating items from the museum’s collection with our students!
Minturn’s gold identification pin on display a the Texas Civil War Museum
James B. Minturn was born in 1833 in New York City, New York. When the Civil War broke out, he decided to leave his work as a merchant to enlist in the Union Army on August 12, 1862. Minturn was mustered into Company B. of the 127th New York Infantry on September 8, 1862, when he was 29 years old. He was promoted to Corporal on January 10th, 1863 and then to 1st Sergeant on August 1, 1863. However, was later Minturn demoted on March 11, 1864 for reasons unknown. On August 11, 1864, he asked for a furlough to attend the Free Military School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Free Military School of Philadelphia was established in 1863 by both abolitionists and Union officers as an institution for the training of white Union soldiers to become officers of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). The school recruited their students from deeply Republican units and trained both soldiers and non-commissioned officers. Private Minturn, however, never became an officer of a USCT unit. Minturn ultimately was dishonorably discharged by the 127th New York on September 24, 1864, but proceeded to accept a commission in the 38th New Jersey Volunteers. James Minturn survived the war and was mustered out in Charleston, South Carolina on January 30th 1865.
The 127th New York Infantry Regiment, also known as the “Monitors,” was under the command of Colonel William Gurney, who organized the regiment in Staten Island, New York. After leaving New York state on September 8, 1862, the 127th served in the defenses of Washington, D.C., eventually joining John J. Abercrombie’s Division, of the 12th Corps, until February of 1863 before transferring to the 22nd Corps (Department of Washington), commanded by General Samuel P. Heintzelman, until April of 1863. The 127th participated in the April Siege of Suffolk as well as Dix’s Peninsula Campaign (June 24-July 7). After short stints in the 7th and 11th corps, the regiment served out the rest of the war, from August, 1863 through June of 1865, in the 12th corps, Department of the South, along the coast of South Carolina, where it participated in the sieges of Forts Wagner, Gregg, and Sumter in August, and in the on-going operations against Charleston. The regiment lost 35 enlisted men killed or fatally wounded and one officer and 94 soldiers to disease during its service in the Civil War.
Fry, Zachery A. “Philadelphia’s Free Military School and the Radicalization of Wartime Officer Education, 1863–64.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 141, no. 3 (2017): 275. https://doi.org/10.5215/pennmaghistbio.141.3.0275.
CWI Fellow Erica Uszak ’22 recently interviewed former NPS Ranger Scott Hartwig for a preview of Hartwig’s upcoming tour at the 2020 CWI Summer Conference.
Why was there a battle at Gettysburg on July 1? How did it result in a tactical Confederate victory but operational Union success, and shape the battle of July 2 and 3? These questions and the major decisions and key actions of the battle on July 1 will be the subject of this tour. The tour will visit all the major points of the First Day’s fighting from Reynolds Woods to Barlow’s Knoll.
During the Fall of 2019, a handful of first-year Gettysburg College students traveled down to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. to conduct primary source research into a group of Civil War soldiers whose “dog tags” now reside in the collections of the Texas Civil War Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. This post is the first in a short series highlighting the stories of the men who wore these unique identification tags into battle. For a short history of military identification tags, or “dog tags,” check out Savannah Labbe’s (’18) 2016 article on the evolution of the dog tag.
Many thanks to Ray Richie, President of the Texas Civil War Museum, for his generosity in sharing these fascinating items from the museum’s collection with our students!
Brierley’s Dog Tag on display at the Texas Civil War Museum.
William H. Brierly, alternatively spelled Bryerly, was born in about 1822 in either Ireland or Lancashire, England. He immigrated to the United States and settled in Bucks County in eastern Pennsylvania, and was living there in 1862 as the American Civil War entered its second year.
As a result of the Federal Militia Act of 1862, William was drafted at age 39-40 and entered as a private into a nine-month regiment, Company A, 174th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment (Drafted Militia) on October 2, 1862, while residing in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Eight of the regiment’s ten companies (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and K) were drawn primarily from eligible male citizens living in Bucks County, with Companies H and I from Northampton County. Private Brierly was mustered into federal service on October 29, 1862. The 174th Pennsylvania was organized at the general camp of rendezvous in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in late October and November of that year, and on November 19 the following field officers were selected: Colonel John Nyce, Lieutenant Colonel Edward T. Hess, and Major Joseph B. Roberts. Later that month the regiment moved to Washington, D.C., then to Suffolk, Virginia, where it was assigned to duty and attached, along with the 176th Pennsylvania Infantry, to Brigadier General Orris S. Ferry’s brigade of Major General John J. Peck’s division at Suffolk, Virginia, 7th Corps, Department of Virginia. In late December the regiment was ordered south and moved to New Bern, North Carolina from December 31, 1862, to January 6, 1863, and there was attached to the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Division, 18th Corps, Department of North Carolina. The regiment, as part of the forces in North Carolina under Major General John G. Foster, was ordered to reinforce the army operating in front of Charleston, South Carolina.
Brierly’s pension paperwork at NARA.
The 174th sailed for Port Royal Harbor, South Carolina, on January 27, 1863, and on February 5, the regiment debarked at St. Helena Island, South Carolina, where it was attached to the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division, 18th Corps, Department of the South. The regiment remained in camp until February 27, when it moved to Beaufort and was attached to the District of Beaufort, South Carolina, 10th Corps, Department of the South. In June, the regiment was stationed at Hilton Head, South Carolina, and attached to the District of Hilton Head, South Carolina, 10th Corps, Department of the South. On July 28, 1863, the regiment embarked for Philadelphia and was mustered out on August 7. During its nine months and nine days of service, the regiment had served on occupation and garrison duty, and Company A did not suffer any deaths, though the regiment had lost 14 men due to disease. Five died in Company F alone. According to the regiment’s final roster, of the 87 members of Brierly’s company, a staggering total of 41, or 47%, deserted while in service, likely due to low morale among the drafted men worsened by their monotonous routine of rear echelon service and the proliferation of camp disease. Private William H. Brierly was mustered out of federal service with his regiment in Pennsylvania on August 7, 1863, having seen little combat but having played a necessary role in Union operations along the South Atlantic Coast.
Pvt. William Brierly’s headstone in Lower Saucon, Northampton County, Pennsylvania.
William Brierly married Sarah Weaver, née Moatz / Moths (born May 14, 1838) in 1867, and with her had four children, all born in eastern Pennsylvania: Mary Alice Brierly (March 17, 1868–May 3, 1936), Anna Dora Elizabeth Brierly (December 7, 1869–January 31, 1912), James Albert Monroe Brierly (December 21, 1873–December 10, 1929), and Ida Savanna Brierly (January 9, 1876–September 11, 1945). William applied for an invalid pension from Pennsylvania on November 14, 1881, but died in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on July 31, 1882, of fatal cancer of the liver. He was 59-60 years of age. The Civil War veteran was buried in the New Jerusalem Old Cemetery in Lower Saucon, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, and his grave was furnished with a U.S. government upright marble headstone that reads “Wm Bryerly CO. A. 174th PA. INF.” In 1888, his wife Sarah Brierly applied for a widow’s pension from Pennsylvania, but her pension application was denied on March 25, 1895. She died on December 6, 1899, at age 61, and was buried with her husband in the New Jerusalem Old Cemetery in Lower Saucon, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. All four of William and Sarah’s children married and had families of their own and lived out their lives in eastern Pennsylvania.
Tim Orr is an Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University, where he teaches classes in nineteenth-century America and Civil War history. A graduate of Gettysburg College, he received his PhD from Penn State University. Prior to his arrival at ODU, Dr. Orr worked for 8 years as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park. His first book, “Last to Leave the Field”: The Life and Letters of First Sergeant Ambrose Henry Hayward, Company D, 28th, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2010. He is the author of several book chapters and articles on the battle of Gettysburg as well as a co-author of the book Never Call Me a Hero: A Legendary American Dive-Bomber Pilot Remembers the Battle of Midway, with Laura Lawfer Orr and N. Jack “Dusty” Kleiss (William Morrow, 2017)
Dr. Tim Orr leading a tour at a previous CWI Conference
CWI: You’re leading our new Active Track option this year, which will focus on sharpshooting at Gettysburg. On its own, this package is shorter (weekend only) and more physically intensive, with rigorous climbs and walks mostly centered on the Union left. Before we get to the specifics of Gettysburg, can you tell us a little bit about sharpshooting and what that term meant for both the Union and Confederate armies in the early summer of 1863?
ORR: In many ways, sharpshooting was a new concept for American armies. Prior to the Civil War, taking care to aim was not something that many soldiers did. Smooth-bored weaponry did not allow for combat range beyond seventy yards, so battles often emphasized the massing of firepower, not marksmanship. (A few rifle regiments had been used during the Revolution and the War of 1812, but rarely did they have a tangible effect on the flow of battle.) During the Civil War, with the addition of a new skirmish drill manual and rifled-musket technology, Civil War infantry were required to fight at long range more and more. This, in turn, required soldiers to surmount an emotional hurdle. Quite often, soldiers considered sharpshooters as akin to murderers, and that killing a soldier when he wasn’t expecting it was dishonorable. However, that feeling died quickly. By 1863, in the Eastern Theater, sharpshooting was en vogue, and Gettysburg is an excellent battlefield to find evidence of that.
Winslow Homer, The Army of the Potomac – A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty, from Harper’s Weekly, vol. 7, November 15, 1862, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
CWI: Many students of the Civil War have heard of Berdan’s Sharpshooters, but their stories aren’t usually the first or second that we hear about Gettysburg–a battlefield that has many intriguing regimental narratives. How important were the sharpshooters on these fields? How did they shape the outcome of the fighting at Gettysburg and why were their contributions important?
ORR: This active-track package is going to focus primarily upon Berdan’s 1st and 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, two of the first specialized regiments in U.S. Army history. We will allocate each day to studying a pivotal action played by Berdan’s men: the 1st U.S.S.S. at Pitzer’s Woods and the 2nd U.S.S.S. at the Slyder Farm and on Big Round Top. Both of these regiments had important roles to play. At noon on July 2, the 1st U.S.S.S. engaged Confederate infantry under Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox inside Pitzer’s Woods, and the resulting combat influenced Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles’s decision to redeploy the Army of the Potomac’s 3rd Corps to the Joseph Sherfy Peach Orchard, one of the pivotal decisions of the battle. Then, later in the day, when Maj. Gen. John B. Hood’s Confederate division arrived to sweep up the Union left flank, it encountered a stubborn skirmish line consisting formed by the 2nd U.S.S.S. During this excursion, we will, in essence, see how a handful of soldiers influenced the tide of battle. It’s a dramatic story!
Alfred Waud, Soldiers shooting from behind rock at Round Top, 1863, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
CWI: What are the most common misconceptions about Civil War sharpshooters?
ORR: At the time, many soldiers in both armies despised sharpshooters, thinking them ungentlemanly. However, that stigma eroded over time, and by 1863, both armies deployed regiments of sharpshooters to augment their fighting abilities. Nowadays, I’m not sure what misconceptions about them exist. Although, I generally assume that most people believe that 1860s rural America produced the best sharpshooters. In reality, the best marksmen came from the cities, where shooting clubs tested riflemen’s skill. In some ways, the North–not the South–had the natural advantage in sharpshooting.
Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Her new book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, will be published by Scribner in February 2020. This project was the recipient of a 2017 NEH Public Scholar Award and a Filson Historical Society Fellowship. Nelson is the author of two previous books: Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012) and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (2005). She has also written about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Times. Her column on Civil War popular culture, “Stereoscope,” appears regularly in the Civil War Monitor.
Dr. Megan Kate Nelson
CWI: Your new book, The Three-Cornered War, is about the Civil War in the West, but you are not writing about what we traditionally think of as the Western Theater. So can you explain how do you define “the West” in your new book, and can you tell us why this “West” is important for understanding the American Civil War?
Nelson: As all CWI attendees know, the term “the West” is most often used to describe the Trans-Mississippi theater (engagements in Missouri, Arkansas, western Tennessee, Louisiana, eastern Texas, and Indian Territory). For this reason, most maps included in Civil War history books extend only as far west as central Texas, erasing roughly 40% of the nation’s landmass. Because what could be west of “the West”? What could have happened in a place that’s not even on the map?
In The Three-Cornered War, I redraw that map of the Civil War, extending it to the Pacific Ocean and including in it not only states and U.S. territories west of the 100th meridian but also the boundaries of Native homelands.
Most of the action in The Three-Cornered War takes place in Colorado, Texas, southern California, New Mexico, and the territory that became Arizona during the war. This region (the Southwest) was a gateway to the larger West in 1861. The Confederacy wanted to seize New Mexico to gain access to California’s gold mines and Pacific ports, and to establish a base for launching additional campaigns for the states and territories of the larger West.
Henry Hopkins Sibley, a career U.S. Army man who resigned his commission to join the Confederacy, had these goals in mind when he invaded New Mexico Territory with a brigade of 3,000 Texans in the winter of 1861-62. Union colonel E.R.S. Canby brought together an army of regulars and Anglo and Hispano volunteers to defend New Mexico against this incursion.
In their subsequent clashes, both armies marched and fought through Native homelands. These communities—Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches and Navajos, in particular—exploited this fight between the Union and the Confederacy early in the war, siphoning animals from army wagon trains and camps and retaking territories they had lost to American military and civilian settlement in the 1850s.
Once the Union defeated the Confederates and drove them back to Texas in the summer of 1862, federal troops under James Carleton turned their attention to defeating Apaches and Navajos. In order to fully win the West during the Civil War, the Union had to wrest its lands from indigenous peoples. The second half of The Three-Cornered War tracks these events through the experiences of Navajos, Chiricahua Apaches, and 1st New Mexico and 1st California soldiers who engaged in these fights.
Approaching the history of the Civil War from this often overlooked (and sometimes dismissed) vantage point reveals surprising elements of the conflict, among them that:
The future of the West remained a contentious issue throughout the war, just as it had been in the 1850s
The battles here shaped several political and economic decisions in the East, and impacted military strategies
The Civil War West’s battles were fought by the war’s first multiracial armies: Anglos, Hispanos, and indigenous peoples from multiple communities
It is my hope that The Three-Cornered War will encourage students and scholars of the Civil War to think more broadly about its history—and that we will start referring to the theater from the Pacific to the 100th meridian as “the West”, and to the Trans-Mississippi as, well, “the Trans-Mississippi.”
CWI: You tell the story of the Civil War in the West through nine major characters. What drew you to this methodological approach? How did the variety and accessibility of source material affect your decision? What did you learn from creating a narrative in this way?
Nelson: When I started to research the Civil War West and realized how many different campaigns there were and how many communities were involved, I faced a narrative challenge. I wanted to make sure that readers would understand the complexity of all of their actions and motivations, but I also wanted to give readers a more personal connection to the people engaged in the battles in this theater in the 1860s.
I was reading a lot of fiction at the time, and had noticed a new trend in storytelling: the multi-perspective narrative in which the reader sees events occurring from several different viewpoints.
I wondered if I could take this narrative strategy from fiction, and use historical sources to shape it. It took a while to find all 9 of the people whose stories I tell in The Three-Cornered War. I chose people whose experiences during the war were representative of their communities. But they were all also somewhat exceptional, in that they either wrote enough about their experiences to help me paint a full picture of them, or they were well-known enough that other people wrote about them.
James Carleton (the Union brigadier-general in command of the Department of New Mexico after 1862) for example, produced the most material of any of the people whose stories I tell in the book. He wrote sheaves of letters, reports, and orders every day, and the local newspaper often wrote about him, his policies, the parties he went to, and the trips he took.
The harsh military policies of Brigadier General James Henry Carleton, commander of the Department of New Mexico, toward native peoples set the tone for much of the U.S. government’s future treatment of Native Americans in its quest to expand white settlement and control of western lands. (Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Juanita, on the other hand, was a Navajo woman who left no written words behind to describe her life. But she did leave the textiles she wove, and descendants to tell her story. She was also married to Manuelito, a prominent Navajo headman, and I was able to pinpoint her movements during the Civil War through the Union Army’s attention to his whereabouts in their records.
Interweaving all of these narratives together was demanding – but it was also really, really fun. I have written two previous books (Trembling Earth (Georgia, 2005) and Ruin Nation (Georgia, 2012), both traditional scholarly books with argument-driven, thematic structures.
In The Three-Cornered War I needed to let the plot drive the narrative, and integrate my arguments seamlessly into both specific and larger stories. Ultimately, my hope is that The Three-Cornered War gives readers the fullest possible sense of the Civil War in this region, while also giving them a really good read.
What I have learned in this process is that writing history is always an act of imagination, even if you are writing in a more traditional way. Historians take the materials that we have to generate a sense of the past for ourselves and for our readers, and that is, fundamentally, a creative act.
CWI: You write about Hispanic civilians and soldiers as well as Native American Indians. How do their relationships with Union and Confederate authorities and issues of race and ethnicity affect military operations in the West?
Nelson: This is one of the other meanings of the title of my book: a California soldier used the phrase “three-cornered war” to describe the battles between the Union, the Confederacy, and Native peoples. The title also refers to a war involving the North, the South, and the West, and to a series of battles fought by Anglos, Native peoples, and Hispanos.
The Union’s Army of New Mexico was the first multiracial army in the Civil War. Hispano volunteers fought in the 1st New Mexico as well as in militias. They marched and camped and fought alongside Anglo volunteers and Army regulars, and Native scouts from several different communities (Utes, Jicarilla Apaches, and Mescalero Apaches). They fought in engagements against the Confederate Texans at Valverde in February 1862, and against Chiricahua Apaches, Mescalero Apaches, Kiowas, Comanches, and Navajos in campaigns in 1863-1864.
Many Hispanos volunteered for the Union army to defend their towns, ranches, and families from invading Texans. Those who stayed on after the Texans retreated did so to join campaigns against Apaches and Navajos, whom they had been fighting in a longstanding cycle of raiding and warfare for generations before Americans’ arrival in the region.
It is important to remember that Hispano New Mexicans’ engagements with Union and Confederate forces were not monolithic. Neither were the actions of indigenous peoples.
Many Native communities in the region traded with the Anglos in their midst and made peace treaties when it suited them. They raided military forts, corrals, and wagon trains when the opportunity arose. Some, as I have noted above, worked as scouts in Union Army campaigns, mostly in fights against other indigenous peoples who were their traditional enemies. They did all of this to express and secure their sovereignty as a people, and (re)gain control over their homelands.
In the Southwest, Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches and the Navajos were the communities who engaged most in warfare with Union troops, because it was their territories that the Union Army most wanted to control in New Mexico and Arizona. They were important thoroughfares for trade and American settlement in the Southwest. They also provided access to mountain gulches and streams that could be panned for gold. In the summer of 1863, after gold was discovered in the mountains of the newly created Union Territory of Arizona, American and Mexican miners flooded into the region. James Carleton subsequently tapped Joseph Rodman West to drive the Chiricahua Apaches from the Butterfield route, and Kit Carson to lead a hard war campaign against the Navajos to clear the way for miners heading west from Albuquerque.
Attention to the West leads us to rethink the Union government’s plans for the future. The Army’s Indian policy under James Carleton was to forego the treaty process and to make war upon Native peoples in order to force their capitulation and removal to reservations. Navajos and Mescalero Apaches became prisoners-of-war in this context, incarcerated on reservations that were far from their homelands. So while the Union Army was fighting for black emancipation in the East, they were fighting to force the migration and imprisonment of Native peoples in the West.
Considering the Hispano and Native dimensions of the Civil War, then, complicates our understanding of the Union Army’s “just war,” and illuminates the multiple and often contradictory elements of “the Union Cause.”
Apache Canyon bridge, Glorieta Pass, NM. The March, 1862 battle of Glorieta Pass resulted in the retreat of Confederate forces from the New Mexico territory back into Arizona and Texas. (Image Courtesy of National Park Service)
With the academic year off to a racing start, the Civil War Institute Fellows are hard at work on their assignments for this semester! Veteran Fellows Cameron Sauers ’21 and Isaac Shoop ’21 have been joined for this year by new recruits, Gavin Maziarz ’22 and Erica Uszak ’22. Each one of our Fellows is so excited to be engaged in their projects and sharing history with all of you!
We recently launched a new Facebook group titled “Gettysburg College’s Civil War Book Club,” where we will be discussing and debating recent works of Civil War scholarship. Fellows Gavin Maziarz, Cameron Sauers, and Isaac Schoop will be posting questions and leading the discussion in the group. Meanwhile, Erica Uszak will be writing a Killed at Gettysburg entry on First Lieutenant Elijah Hayden, Co. H , 8th Ohio.
Here on the blog, our Fellows will continue to share reflections and insights from their chosen projects. We will also continue to update the blog with posts reporting on special events both on campus and around Gettysburg.
We hope you will continue to support the Fellows by reading their posts, sharing and liking pieces, commenting, and asking any questions that these posts might provoke. We students are learning right alongside you and enjoy any opportunity to engage in thoughtful discussion about the topics at hand.
The Civil War Institute is excited to launch its Facebook book club titled “Gettysburg College’s Civil War Book Club.” We will post an open invite on the CWI Facebook to join the group, or you can directly search “Gettysburg College’s Civil War Book Club” on Facebook. There are no fees or requirements to join the group, any and all are welcome to join us! We intend this group to be a forum for discussion and debate about recent selected Civil War scholarship. We encourage you to join our CWI Fellows in reading the selected book and be a part of the conversation. Our Fellows team will be posting discussion questions relating to the book and working to foster a discussion among group members.
We will not post discussion questions in the group right away, so that those who are interested in participating can acquire a copy of the book and begin reading. Discussion questions will be posted chronologically in relation to the book, so read at your leisure and savor the enjoyment of a good book. We are very excited for this initiative and hope you are too!
By Cameron Sauers ’21 The bearer of this sword was a member of a United States Navy that rapidly grew in power during the Civil War, increasing its enlistment 500% and developing the first ironclad ship. However, even as the Navy was in the midst of its transition, one thing remained in place: The U.S. … Continue reading “Cutting Through the Ranks: the Navy’s Forgotten Legacy”
For all officers, Swords shall be a cut-and-thrust blade, not less than twenty-six nor more than twenty-nine inches long; half-basket hilt; grip white. Scabbards of black leather; mounting of yellow gilt. – 1864 US Naval Dress Regulations (photo via Smithsonian)
The bearer of this sword was a member of a United States Navy that rapidly grew in power during the Civil War, increasing its enlistment 500% and developing the first ironclad ship. However, even as the Navy was in the midst of its transition, one thing remained in place: The U.S. Model 1852 Navy Officer’s Sword. The sword is still used in the Navy today, albeit for ceremonial purposes. Yet, for all that this sword symbolizes, very few scholars have given much attention to it or the sailors who used it in the Civil War. The common soldier has received much more attention than the common seaman and his officers. While there were considerably more men serving in the Army than the Navy (the Navy started the war with 7,600 sailors and grew to 51,500 by the end, whereas the Union Army boasted about 2.2 million enlisted men), the Navy was still an important part of the Union war effort and therefore deserving of attention. An analysis of the U.S. Model 1852 Navy Officer’s Sword provides a window into the complicated power dynamics between naval officers and enlisted seamen. Furthermore, such an analysis also highlights the naval officers’ often contentious relationships with officers from other military branches, who frequently clashed over who was in command of joint naval-army operations. The sword also begs the question as to what types of individuals may have possessed, or fallen under the authority of, such swords, why they joined the Union Navy in the first place, and the challenges of command that confronted naval officers.
During the Civil War, change happened in nearly all aspects of the Navy, from the types of ships deployed down to the small arms used by sailors, all with the aim to transition the Navy from a small force into a global power. One of these changes was a move away from heavier broadswords towards a new cutlass modeled after the French naval cutlass, which would be the last naval sword issued to common sailors. However, the new naval cutlass lacked the beauty and authority of the 1852 Naval Officer’s Sword, which was not altered during the Civil War. The sword was one of the few holdovers from the weak antebellum Navy, which would be transformed into a powerful force during the Civil War. When Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles assumed his post in March of 1861, he needed to rapidly mobilize ships and men to serve on them. The officers and seamen who served on naval ships created a unique maritime culture and experience different from what soldiers serving in the Army experienced. Enlisting in the Navy was an individual activity and lacked the theatrical or grand patriotic displays of enlistment traditionally associated with the Army. Army regiments marched off to war with flags made by wives and sweethearts and often participated in parades through hometowns before they went South for battle. Historian Michael Bennett argues that since ships were only able to be operated by collective groups of men, and not a singular individual, naval warfare clashed with the public’s belief that a singular individual could turn the tide of battle with their heroism. Thus, there were no grand send-offs for Union sailors. Enlisted sailors also represented a slightly different demographic from those in the Army. The “common sailor” was 26 years old and hailed from a major city along the Atlantic coast. He was also likely an unemployed worker from the laboring class seeking relief from an unemployment crisis among the skilled trades. The Navy also had significantly higher percentages of African-Americans and immigrants than did the Union Army.
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles (via Wikimedia Commons)
In contrast to his men, the naval officer who would have carried this sword with him was likely a native born, middle-or upper-class man who understood that the Navy was a hierarchy that functioned much like aristocracy. Unlike the Army, the Navy was not beset by problems of politically appointed officers because no politician was brazen enough to believe they could adequately command a warship, let alone a fleet or squadron. Commander J. A. Winslow wrote that the Navy would not accept “useless officers” in exchange for enlisted men. The Navy thus saw itself, especially its officer corps, as a uniquely professional service where experience was necessary. Graduation from the antebellum Naval Academy could take between 5 and 7 years, and with the first class of graduates joining the Navy in 1854, it was clear that experience could not be compensated for. However, the difference in background between officers and common seamen made it difficult for them to understand each other, leading to clashes and tests of authority.
This sword was a key symbol of authority for naval officers who continually found themselves in a struggle to maintain power over their men. Since officers and enlisted sailors came from different social classes, they frequently clashed over behavioral habits. Officers hated sailors’ penchant for rum, swearing, and brawls because such habits were unacceptable in the polite society to which they were accustomed. This disapproval, in turn, made officers appealing targets for the oaths of seamen – the phrase “swear like a sailor” fit in the Union navy. The two groups frequently complained about each other, with sailors snarking that officers were incompetent and officers lamenting that their sailors were inefficient with their labor. Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter complained to Rear Admiral Andrew H. Foote that “they send us all rubbish here; we want good men.” The clanging of this expensive sword, however, would have sent procrastinating sailors back to work, perhaps with an ensuing string of oaths about their upper-class officers. Even just sitting at the officer’s hip, this sword acted as a stark reminder of the status difference between the wealthy officer and the poor seamen he commanded. This sword is 39.25” inches long and, unlike the standard naval cutlass, was manufactured by Ames. The grip is wrapped in sharkskin and the blade is etched to show a fouled anchor, acanthus leaf, and U.S. shield. The elaborate designs continue onto the scabbard, including the drag of a dolphin. This sword is substantially more ornate than the traditional naval cutlass and would have cost much more than the average sailor could ever afford—a fact that intimidated some sailors into compliance, while making others bristle at the aristocratic displays of their officers. While army officers regularly clashed with some of their enlisted men, they truly feared any serious attempts to undermine authority onboard their naval vessels, as such behavior could spark a mutiny that could prove especially dangerous for the entire crew. Thus, it was imperative that naval officers remind the seamen, by action and by sword, that they possessed unquestionable authority, through experience, class, and social rank, over the ship.
While an officer’s sword would help him assert his authority over sailors, it was less effective in asserting naval authority when performing joint operations with the Army. At the start of the war, there was no protocol for who was to command joint naval and army operations, which hampered Union efforts because neither branch’s officers were willing to concede their own authority. This often left both parties in an uncomfortable dilemma. Some of these standoffs were either awkwardly or aggressively resolved, as was the case in 1862 during the joint Peninsula Campaign in Virginia, when Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase watched the initial contest for Hampton Roads stagnate because neither the army nor naval officers would concede authority in rolling out the campaign plans. The stalemate was resolved only when Chase subsequently received permission from President Lincoln to order the operation forward by invoking President Lincoln’s name, as the President is the sole individual with inherent authority over both Army and Navy. Historian Craig L. Symonds argues that for joint operations, cooperation was encouraged and perhaps expected, but it could never be mandated from officers, who were held accountable for their actions alone. Ultimately, the success of such operations was more dependent on the meshing of personalities than on any one side’s material or behavioral display of authority.
Unlike many Army officers, Union Naval Secretary Gideon Welles believed firmly in running the Navy as a meritocracy where officers were “energetic, resourceful, uncomplaining and ruthlessly aggressive,” which contributed to Army-Navy tensions. Naval officers’ inclination toward risk-taking produced a near-Navy-wide disdain for Army colleagues who received their postings through political jockeying instead of achievements in battle. Hence, when it came time for joint operations, naval officers felt they deserved command because they had the experience necessary to make important decisions about bold battle plans. Meanwhile, politically appointed Army officers may have felt they deserved command because they raised entire regiments of men themselves, and thus felt that their subordinates deserved to go into battle under the command of the man they signed up to fight under. Army officers also resented the fact that, if they made a mistake in battle that sacrificed the regiment they had raised, they would likely be cashiered or court martialed from the service. But if a naval officer had one of his ships sunk, his men would likely still survive, as they could simply be rescued by nearby boats or escape to land, as often happened, and, naval officers were more likely to simply be reassigned after such a failure, rather than discharged. No matter their politics, or wherever their command was, naval officers had a sword representative of their station. Unlike for Army officers, these swords were an unmistakable symbol of an individual’s military merit and not their political connections. Even so, naval officers routinely found that the authority invested in them through their swords, and all that these prized possessions symbolized, was tested at nearly every turn, on land and at sea, by army officers as well as enlisted seamen.
Admiral David Dixon Porter (via Wikimedia Commons)
As the Navy moved forward into the age of ironclad ships, traditional naval blades were eventually left behind alongside the outdated age of wooden battle ships. With the military efficiency afforded by ironclads, there was no longer a need for boarding parties, or for a blade to cut rigging down, and so the cutlass was phased out. The regal naval officers’ sword, however, remained, and is still used for ceremonial purposes today. Long celebrated as a “gentleman’s weapon,” the naval sword resisted retirement partially due to the reverence its bearers held for its symbolic appeals to uniquely naval traditions, as well as its symbolic celebration of military merit, social rank, and class distinction. The cold steel of the sword has been permanently enshrined in marble at the Naval Peace Monument, which was erected in 1877 on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol building. A dove (now missing) on the monument “once nested upon a sheaf of wheat in a grouping of a cornucopia, turned earth, and a sickle resting across a sword.” The sword is part of a monument that reminds viewers that “They died that their country may live.” Although the authority of the sword’s bearers was consistently tested, both on land and at sea, the sword’s featured placement on the monument stands as a lasting testament to the authority, influence, and distinction with which navy officers and the men they commanded served in order to ensure the successful prosecution of the Union war effort.
Sources:
Bennett, Michael J. Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Eng, Matthew. ““Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye”: The Civil War Navies in Public Memory.” In The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning, edited by Kreiser Lawrence A. and Allred Randal, 117-34. University Press of Kentucky, 2014.
“Peace Monument.” Architect of the Capitol. Accessed March 21, 2019.
Over the course of this year, we’ll be interviewing some of the speakers from the upcoming 2019 CWI Conference about their talks. Today we are speaking with Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and the Chair of LSU’s History Department. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and southern History. He is the author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (UNC Press, 2007), Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2008), and is the editor of several other volumes. His most recent book, The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War, was released by Harvard University Press in Fall, 2018.
Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean
CWI: Your most recent book, The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War, is fresh off the press. What were the main interpretive questions that motivated you to research and write this book? What was the primary methodological framework that you used when writing this book?
SHEEHAN-DEAN: Initially, I wanted to answer what I thought would be a straight-forward question: Who could be lawfully killed in war? I wanted to explore how people made ethical decisions about who could be subjected to violence. In the process of researching what was supposed to be a stand-alone essay, I realized that we don’t have a clear sense of who was killed, never mind how people justified that killing. So, I spent a long time studying regular battles, guerrillas, occupation, sieges – basically, all the places where violence existed. What I found was that an easy dichotomy between either a bloody harbinger of the twentieth century or a restrained gentleman’s war failed to capture the reality. The war was both bloody and restrained, filled with both malice and charity (to paraphrase Lincoln). I then spent a long time piecing together how people understood and explained their behavior (to themselves and the world at large). So, the book is partly intellectual history but, in the nineteenth century, that means religious history, cultural history, and legal and political history. Last, I felt it was important to capture the attitudes of both sides. We have a number of excellent books on how northerners thought about war but because war is a dynamic process, our vision should encompass both North and South.
CWI: How has your research into the violence of the Civil War changed or enriched your previous understanding of 19th-century warfare? How might your research influence the way everyday Americans remember the Civil War?
SHEEHAN-DEAN: Participants in the Civil War drew on older models of warfare, both European and American, and innovated. The role of slavery created a new problem. The US Army had encountered slavery before – in the Seminole Wars, among others – but the federal government had never turned decisively against it, which created a whole new role for the army, something more akin to the efforts demanded of it in the 20th and 21st Century, when we anticipate that soldiers will interact with enemy civilians and that every military action has political consequences. Emancipation entailed both the seizure of personal property (belonging to the slaveholder), a shift of manpower from the Confederate to the Union side of the war, and the social and political consequences of liberating enslaved people. When the US Army operates today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, we know that confiscating property or jailing suspected enemies can shape the political support for or against an American presence. Imperial armies of the 18th century didn’t have much concern to this issue. I was also surprised by the pervasive respect for the laws of war, not just among soldiers but among citizens as well. Although few people had read Grotius (the 17th-century Dutch jurist who wrote the basic compendium of the laws of war for Europe), they knew roughly what lawful conduct looked like and they expected their armies to practice it. This reminds us that in a democracy, the army is the people and vice versa. We have responsibility, as citizens, for ensuring that our military respects the values we hold, which can be hard to articulate and enforce in the midst of conflict. I anticipate that readers will find stories that discourage them – some episodes in the war demonstrate that wartime Americans were no better behaved than anyone else when it came to war and sometimes people used the law of war itself as a cover to commit unnecessary violence. Other stories might inspire them by revealing the ways that laws curtailed excessive violence and in general, the power of people to choose wisely about how to conduct war.
Confederate and Union dead lying side by side at Fort Mahone, April, 1865. (Image courtesy Library of Congress.)
CWI: According to this new research, how did the violence of the Civil War influence Reconstruction and both its short-term and long-term legacies?
SHEEHAN-DEAN: I didn’t carry the story into Reconstruction, which is a weakness of the book, though it took a lot of pages to reach the war’s end… As readers will see, there was a lot in the war that left bad legacies and alienated southerners from northerners and black people from white people. But it also left legacies of peace and mercy. As with almost everything in history, it becomes a question of interpretation. It was easier for white southerners to mythologize Sherman’s destructiveness and paint themselves as victims and it was easier for white northerners to take credit for ending slavery and believe their conduct was flawless. Neither of these stereotypes is true but they played an important role in shaping postwar politics.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not reflect the position of the Civil War Institute, nor of all CWI Fellows or Civil War enthusiasts. While the author received many names that deserved to be on this list, he regrettably had to choose only ten. That being said, please sit back, relax, and prepare to fall in love with the officers of Gettysburg this Valentine’s Day.
Winfield Scott Hancock
Wearing a crisp white shirt into battle? The goatee? “Hancock the Superb” is a true icon!
Francis Barlow
This boyish-faced Harvard graduate was known to wear a checkered, flannel lumberjack shirt under an unbuttoned uniform coat.
Henry Kyd Douglas
The author of “I rode with Stonewall” needs no complimenting from us (he did it enough in his book).
George Custer
Known for his flashy uniform and flamboyance, Custer’s style plus flowing blonde hair makes him worthy of a coveted spot on our list.
Alexander “Sandie” Swift Pendleton
With boyish good looks at 22 while at Gettysburg, we can’t help but swoon over Sandie Pendleton.
Lafayette Guild
Guild was noted for his study of yellow fever, which is good because we’re burning up for the Medical Director of the Army of the Northern Virginia!
Walter Taylor
From a young, attractive cadet at VMI to Lee’s personal aide-de-camp, Taylor gracefully managed the burden of serving on Lee’s small staff and matured with poise during the war.
Gouverneur Kemble Warren
While his statue continues to keep lookout on Little Round Top, we should be keeping a lookout for him!
Richard Garnett
Garnett was kicked in the leg by his horse, leaving him unable to walk during the Gettysburg Campaign. It was only fitting for a man who makes us weak in the knees.
Strong Vincent
The mutton chops and “Strong” name makes Vincent the perfect choice to round out our list (the Harvard education doesn’t hurt either).
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