New and Noteworthy: Life During Wartime--Living, Dying and Surviving in Richmond, Virginia

Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital,Stephen Ash, University of North Carolina Press, 296 ppages,  illustrations, bibliographic notes, bibliography, 2019.  $35.00.

Reviewed by Michael E. Woods (Marshall University) Published on H-CivWar (January, 2020)

A fresh-faced lieutenant screams from a hospital bed. Shopkeepers fence stolen goods, while an equally entrepreneurial embalmer smuggles deserters and draft dodgers out of town in coffins. Neighbors hear a confectioner lashing an enslaved girl with a leather strap; the next day, the four-year-old child is found dead. In a filthy shack near the wharves, a young prostitute dies alone from a laudanum overdose. These kinds of stories are rarely commemorated with monuments or dramatized in reenactments. But they are all Civil War stories, and they all find a place in Stephen V. Ash’s outstanding Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital. 

Richmond was a national capital and a target for attack, a commercial hub and a manufacturing powerhouse, a haven for refugees and a place of captivity. But although historians have thoroughly documented the city’s political and military histories, the experiences of its humbler residents, whose numbers swelled to more than 100,000 during the conflict, have received less attention. The purpose of Ash’s book is to explore “how ordinary Richmonders”—black and white, enslaved and free, male and female, rich and poor, civilian and soldier—“fared in the maelstrom of war” (p. 3).

Ash quite logically emphasizes Richmond’s uniqueness, but the city’s prominence in both history and historiography means that this book will fascinate not only local historians but also readers interested in everything from common soldiers and women’s history to class conflict and slave resistance.
Ash surveys life in wartime Richmond in a series of thematic chapters. The city’s diverse population was fractured along lines of wealth, status, and occupation, but most Richmonders faced an increasingly severe struggle to get by as neighbors multiplied and resources dwindled in what one local paper aptly called the “metropolis of the South” (p. 19).

Richmond’s population may have tripled during the war as bureaucrats, soldiers, refugees, impressed slaves, and drifters, driven by force or free will, crowded into the city. With housing scarce and rents soaring, civilians squeezed into rented rooms, hotels, and offices while soldiers and enslaved laborers lived in nearby barracks and encampments and a growing number of captives—including political prisoners and captured Union soldiers—languished in jails and camps. And although proximity to a rich agricultural hinterland had kept antebellum Richmond well fed, wartime disruption and overcrowding created a parallel crisis of sustenance. As with the housing shortage, public efforts to increase food supply met with mixed results: most Richmonders did not starve, but the poor and the wards of the Confederate government waged a desperate struggle for subsistence.
 
Unlike food and shelter, jobs were plentiful in a city where fierce competition for workers pitted private manufacturers against public-sector employers and the military. Even though Confederate officers detailed soldiers to work in factories and other productive enterprises, the labor shortage remained acute, so considerable numbers of enslaved people, free blacks, and white women and children filled the void. Of course, with so many strangers coming and going, old fears of insurrection and new apprehensions of disloyalty fostered an atmosphere of suspicion.

Deserters and Unionist agents did not topple the city’s Confederate power structure, but the prevalence of crime and immorality, coupled with resistance by enslaved people, made many affluent white Richmonders fear the worst. The outbreak of Richmond’s infamous bread riots in April 1863 seemed to portend a more general uprising of the city’s motley underclass, and for the last two years of the war, local officials mixed poor relief with paramilitary repression in an effort to keep order. The proximity of military force reassured Richmond’s elite, but the proliferation of military hospitals, complete with the sights, sounds, and smells of suffering and death, provided a constant reminder of the war’s costs.

Ash has indeed brought “wartime Richmond to life as a city of flesh-and-blood men, women, and children of many sorts who responded in very human ways to extraordinarily trying circumstances” (p. 5). The success of this rich social history stems from diligent archival research. Ash delved into a variety of manuscript materials, including personal correspondence, the records of the Southern Claims Commission, church and hospital records, and letters received by the Confederate Provost Marshal’s Office and the Confederate Secretary of War.

These dusty files yielded a trove of poignant stories that demonstrate how Richmond’s diverse residents navigated a city shaken to its core by an increasingly revolutionary conflict. From the arrest of an African American bartender who allegedly spoke to a white man with “insolent and provoking language” (p. 175) to hospital matrons’ attempts to brighten their dreary living quarters, Rebel Richmond compellingly illuminates how Richmonders lived, labored, and died in a city where the war sometimes reached the suburbs and was never far away.

This book complements previous accounts of wartime Richmond by Emory M. Thomas and Ernest B. Furgurson, which relied (particularly in Thomas’s case) more heavily on published materials.[1] It also will provide opportunities for comparative analysis if read alongside other urban histories, such as Wendy Hamand Venet’s study of Civil War-era Atlanta and William Warren Rogers Jr.’s work on Montgomery.[2] Indeed, what Richmond shared with other Confederate cities may be as important as what set it apart. Richmond’s status as a political, industrial, and military center certainly made it a distinctly attractive target for Union strategists and a singularly powerful symbol of Confederate nationalism, and Ash quite reasonably underscores its uniqueness.

But many aspects of Richmond’s story had parallels in other Confederate cities. Union war planners coveted New Orleans and Atlanta; manufacturing boomed in Selma and Augusta; refugees streamed into Raleigh and Columbia. Rebel Richmond therefore underscores the centrality of cities to the story of the Confederacy. As Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers have pointed out, for all the obvious importance of Southern plantation agriculture, and for all the Lost Cause paeans to an agrarian way of life, cities were at the heart of the Confederate project, from the meeting of secession conventions to the manufacturing of war materiel and the marshaling of armies.[3] Rebel Richmond demonstrates this point brilliantly and poignantly. Regardless of where they came from or why they were there, Richmonders—all 100,000 or more of them—experienced an emphatically urban Civil War.

Bibliographic Notes:
[1]. Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971); Ernest B. Furgurson, Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
[2]. Wendy Hamand Venet, A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); William Warren Rogers Jr., Confederate Home Front: Montgomery during the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
[3]. Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, “Introduction: Historians and the Urban South’s Civil War,” in Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015): 1-23.
 
Full Text Source: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54431

News---Battle of Gettysburg Witness' Death Remembered

Sadie Shriver, An Eyewitness To The Battle of Gettysburg, Died at age 18, Jacqueline Palochko, The Evening Sun, November 20, 2011.

It's a solemn procession. Women are walking, holding flowers, with their hoop skirts hitting the fallen brown leaves on the ground. Men in top hats, staring straight ahead under the gray November clouds. Slowly, the crowd moves to Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg on Sunday morning. And around the gray, faded tombstones, they gather. More than 130 years ago, this is how the loved ones of Sadie Shriver might have said goodbye to her. But when her family buried her, one thing was missing -- a headstone.

This was a young woman who came from one of the oldest families in Adams County, Nancie Gudmestad, director of the Shriver House in Gettysburg said. A little girl who kissed her father, George Shriver, goodbye as he rode off to war. An eyewitness to the Battle of Gettysburg when she was just 7 years old. And when she was 18 years old -- two weeks before her 19th birthday -- she died from tuberculosis and was laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery. Yet -- for some unknown reason -- her grave has been unmarked since she died in 1874. Until Sunday.

On what would have been her 156th birthday, a ceremony was held to unveil a headstone at Sadie's grave. A funeral procession with a couple dozen people, including re-enactors, traveled from the historical Shriver House on Baltimore Street to the cemetery.

So, they gathered around Sadie's grave. And spoke of how she must have seen the bloody, wounded soldiers during the battle. How she heard their last cries for help before they died. How she smelled gun smoke in the air. And among the crowd were some distant relatives of Sadie. A few years ago, Diane Weikert Dolan, of New Jersey, visited Gettysburg and toured the Shriver House. And when she started to hear the stories of the Shriver family and Sadie's mother -- Hettie Shriver, whose maiden name was Weikert -- it all sounded familiar. "They started telling me my family history," she said.


For Becki Powell, who now lives in Hershey, her family history was right under her nose. When she was living in Littlestown, she was a tour guide for the Shriver House. Around the same time, she started looking through books her family had been using to record their history. And there it was -- notes on Hettie and George Shriver in her family history book. Since then, Powell has visited Evergreen Cemetery to pay respects at the graves of her distant, long-lost relatives. She found the grave of Sadie's younger sister, Mollie; and their grandparents, Sarah and Jacob Weikert. But she always had trouble finding Sadie's. "I find this all very moving," Powell said of the ceremony for Sadie.

And before they left -- before they went back to their Sundays -- each visitor left a pebble on Sadie's grave. It's a Jewish tradition, Gudmestad said, to let the dead know they haven't been forgotten. "Sadie will know that someone came to visit her today," Gudmestad said.

Text and Image Source: Evening Sun November 20, 2011

CWL---The Real War Is Getting Into the Books: First Person Accounts of Carnage, September 1862

Misery Holds High Carnival, Judson H. Nelson, America's Civil War, September 2007, pp. 30-39.

". . . a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice and maggots hold high carnival . . . . " Surgeon Daniel Holt, 121 New York Volunteers, began writing letters home after the battle of South Mountain, Maryland on September 14th. Rare is the soldier who wrote the Mrs. of Rebels with brains blown out, eyes popped out, and arms lifted in the air.

John H. Nelson, author of As the Grain Falls Before the Reaper: The Federal Hospital Sites and Identified Federal Casualties at Antietam, a CD-Rom, has collected a series of striking remarks from surgeons, newspaper correspondents, U.S. Sanitary Commission and U.S. Christian Commission worker, civilians and rank-and-file soldiers and organized them into an article.

At the Smoketown Hospital, really shebangs for the wounded, "The medicines are on the grounds, and tables, boxes , etc. without order or regularity. There is want of attention to police the wards and camp. Direst and garbage are accumulated in large quantities. . ." describes Assistant Medical Director W. R. Mosely. He contrasts the Smoketown shebangs with the Locust Spring Hospital, that had 24 tents each with their own stone fireplaces and superior bedding, that is bedsteads described as sacks filled with straw and covered with sheets, quilts and blankets.

Among the many descriptions Nelson has presented, CWL fully appreciates the material on the Otto Farm, located on the west side of Burnside's Bridge, a discussion that may be representative of the blight upon the farming community. With damages in excess of $2,300, Otto received a settlement check for $893.85. Another farmer,
Ephraim Getting whose farms held a portion of the Locust Spring hospital, claimed $1,238.45 in damages. He received no settlement.

For CWL, the article is a unfootnoted tease. CWL hopes that Nelson expands the article and North and South Magazine publishes it.

Other Voices: To Live and Die in Dixie: Civilians In Petersburg, Virginia

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-CivWar@h-net.msu.edu (June 2007)

A Wilson Greene. Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. xi + 363 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $34.95 (cloth)

Reviewed for H-CivWar by Robert N. Thompson, Independent Scholar

As A. Wilson Greene points out in his preface to Civil War Petersburg, there has been an increasing amount of scholarship in recent years dedicated to examining the lives of noncombatants during the Civil War. One genre of this scholarship might be termed the "community study," in which the economic, social, political, and military impact of the war on a specific city or town is studied. This study, in turn, allows the modern reader to gain a feel for not only how the people viewed and reacted to great events of the time, but also how the war affected their every day lives,particularly when war came calling at their doorsteps.

Greene, the Executive Director of the Pamplin Historical Park and National Museum of the Civil War Soldier, just outside Petersburg, has a natural interest in the city's role in the war and, as his research makes clear, he makes good use of some wonderful source material in developing his study. His heavy reliances on primary sources, especially letters and diaries taken from the collected papers of individuals and families who lived in the city during the war, allows these citizens to speak to us across time, conveying their feelings and impressions literally as they were captured at particular moments in time. This, in turn, gives us the most accurate image possible of what their lives were like.

However, Greene is careful not to rely solely on these sources, lest he convey only the image of the city provided by those few who documented their lives. He also uses editorial comments and reports from the local newspapers, as well as statistical data to tell his story. From all these sources, we see Petersburg as a thriving pre-war commercial center whose strategic position astride the railway leading to Richmond would eventually make it subject to the longest siege of the war.

While Greene provides extensive detail on virtually every aspect of live in the city as the war progressed, two aspects stand out as particularly enlightening: the war's impact on the African American population and the effects of financial inflation.The first is particularly interesting because Petersburg had one of the South's largest free African American populations. In fact, as Green points out, in 1860, 36 percent of Petersburg's African American's were free, and, some 26 percent of Petersburg's total free population was African American--the highest percentage of any city in the South (p. 8). Further, the majority of these free African Americans were women and they owned half the property held by the city's black population. Some free African Americans managed to become quite affluent. In fact, one of the more interesting points in Greene's book is that some of the free African American women who worked as prostitutes or became concubines to white men were so affluent that they actually owned their own slaves.

As the war progressed, the African American population's situation worsened. Initially, both free black men and slaves volunteered to support the Confederacy by joining the cause as laborers to build defensive works and fortifications. While they appeared enthusiastic, Greene states this enthusiasm was demonstrated primarily out of necessity, and did not reflect any true zeal for the Southern cause. The workers were paid, however, and the city actually provided some welfare and sustenance, however meager, for the families left behind in the Petersburg. However, as the war continued, the African American population was hit especially hard by increased racial tensions, which led to increased arrests and harsh punishment for African Americans accused of even the most petty of crimes. Further, along with the
poor white population, they were devastated by the effects of rampant economic inflation.

Greene points out that, as was probably the case in much of the South, nothing did more damage to the city's economy than inflation, which was primarily fueled by a lack of commodities. He demonstrates this by citing some of the differences in prices between the winter of 1863 and the spring of 1864. During the winter months, butter rose from $4.00 a pound to $15.00, while the price for an egg increased by 1,500 percent in only seven months. Other staples saw similar inflation, with flour increasing from $75.00 to $300.00 dollars per barrel; beef rising from 30 cents to $4.00 per pound; and meal elevating from $12.00 to $40.00 dollars per bushel.

Greene also documents the steady decline of the city's commercial and industrial base. As supplies of cotton and tobacco diminished, the mills and tobacco warehouses began to close. Further, a lack of spare parts for machinery also severely limited the capabilities of those factories and mills that did operate. Eventually, many of the tobacco warehouses were converted to hospitals for wounded soldiers, but this loss in economic infrastructure further worsened life for both whites and African-Americans,who depended on these mills, factories, and warehouses for employment.

Finally, with the siege of the city beginning in the summer of 1864, life in the city would markedly change. The regular bombardment by Federal artillery ended many of the few remaining social activities of the city, and disrupted the very patterns of daily life. The siege, which would last for ten months,left an indelible impact, which can still be seen today.

While this book is not the sort that many Civil War enthusiasts will flock to, it is an excellent scholarly study, and one that provides valuable insights into urban Southern life during the war. The fact that the subject city also became a key strategic point in the war provides for additional interest and the opportunity for further insight. In total, the book sets a new standard for its genre and one we hope others will strive to meet.

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CWL --- Walking Gettysburg's Battlefield: The Lutheran Seminary Hospital

The Hospital on Seminary Ridge at the Battle of Gettysburg, Michael A. Dreese, McFarland Publishing, Illustrations, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index, 200 pp, 2002, hardcover $45.00, 2005 paperback $29.95.

“How goes it?” “Well, John. There’s the devil to pay!” The red brick, 19th century building was made popular by the by the film Gettysburg; its cupola was made iconic by Union generals Buford and Reynolds. The Lutheran Seminary building, now named Schmucker Hall, was one of the centers of learning and religion in the Gettysburg of 1863. Luther probably would not have winced at Buford’s declaration; there is much in Luther’s theology that holds that the Devil indeed would ask to be paid war’s wages.

In this book, Michael Dreese pays homage to the building, the lives, and this particular (using Joshua Chamberlain’s words) ‘vision place of souls.’ A stop on the National Park Service’s real and virtual tours, this four story structure from basement to the attic witnessed the agony or death of slightly less than 1,000 souls.

Dreese’s story begins on March 2, 1826 in Hagerstown, Maryland. Carlisle, Gettysburg and Hagerstown made the short list of locations chosen by the ten founding members of the Theological Seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. In the same spirit that possesses local government today, Adams county residents raised $7,000 in subscriptions for a seminary if the location would be Gettysburg; as an added inducement, the free use of the Adams County Academy building until the seminary structure could be completed was offered. Using short, focused chapters, the author sketches community, church and student leadership and their efforts to found, build and maintain a theological seminary.

Samuel Schmucker, 27 years old founder and 64 year old seminary professor and president during battle, is present on almost 20% of the pages. Charles Krauth, selected for the second professorship in 1850, and his family is similarly covered. All three seminary buildings: Schmucker’s house, Krauth’s house, and the classroom and dormitory are literally soaked in blood during the battle and it’s aftermath. Student members of the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia have left memoirs that Dreese presents. The McFarland family which lived in the basement of the ‘Old Dorm’ and provided housing, grounds and building maintenance services passed through the battle. As they fled out the front door of the building the Slentz family, tenants of the McPherson farm located to the immediate west of the seminary, ran through the back door and stayed in the Slentz’s apartment.

In detail, the week before and the first day of the battle is covered. Anecdotes of civilians and soldiers reveal seminary students passing through Rebel lines to preach sermons. Henry Jacobs, a student of Pennsylvania (now Gettysburg) College recalls an 1861 dream that is prescient of July 1, 1863. Lt. Jerome, of the Signal Corps and attached to Buford’s cavalry division, recollects his service in the seminary building’s cupola. The building begins to fill with Federal cavalry wounded then infantry wounded. After 6 pm the Rebels pass through the buildings and steal all the Federal First Corps medical implements and medicines, leaving about 700 wounded and their doctors to their agonies and devices.

During the remainder of the book, Dreese presents stories of desperate doctors treating both Federal and Confederate wounded. As limbs pile up outside of the three buildings, graves are dug in the gardens and yards of the seminary. For the months of July, August and September, the seminary is a war hospital; the U.S. Sanitary Committee and the Christian Commission, a forerunners of the Red Cross, provided food, supplies and staff to care for residents. It is not until October that seminary classes resume.

Dreese’s book is an excellent work. Depending largely on personal recollections found in newspapers of the era, personal diaries, letters and reported conversations, Dreese offers a civilian story well balanced with a military story. Readers of Gettysburg Magazine will find familiar, detailed coverage of battle events and, possibly, unfamiliar coverage of civilian events. Priced somewhat high at $30 for a paperback, it is worth every cent. Those smitten by the events at the Seminary may feel compelled to aid the Seminary Ridge Historic Preservation Foundation (SRHPR).

Currently, the Old Dorm is occupied by the Adams County Historical Society , which is in its first year of fundraising for a new building to be located east of Barlow’s Knoll. Within five years, it is expected, the Society will be moving and the Preservation Foundation will begin work on the restoration of the building. At this time three of the four floors are open for viewing. The attic is closed uto visitors unless they are on an SRHPF tour. Contributors to the foundation may enter the cupola during SRHPF open houses. The view is one of a kind.

Forthcoming: Women in the American Civil War

Women in the American Civil War, Volumes 1 & 2, Lisa Tendrich Frank, ed., ABC-CLIO Press, November, 2007, $195.00

These volumes provide 400 entries of individuals, organizations, issues and roles of women. Twelve essays address women in the North and South, slave and free, before, during and after the war. The books also include portions of documents, diaries and letters.

New and Noteworthy: A People at War

A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, Scott R. Nelson and Carol Sheriff, Hardcover: 384 pages, Oxford University Press, $25.00

Claiming more than 600,000 lives, the American Civil War had a devastating impact on countless numbers of common soldiers and civilians, even as it brought freedom to millions. This book shows how average Americans coped with despair as well as hope during this vast upheaval.

A People at War brings to life the full humanity of the war's participants, from women behind their plows to their husbands in army camps; from refugees from slavery to their former masters; from Mayflower descendants to freshly recruited Irish sailors. We discover how people confronted their own feelings about the war itself, and how they coped with emotional challenges (uncertainty, exhaustion, fear, guilt, betrayal, grief) as well as physical ones (displacement, poverty, illness, disfigurement). The book explores the violence beyond the battlefield, illuminating the sharp-edged conflicts of neighbor against neighbor, whether in guerilla warfare or urban riots.

The authors travel as far west as China and as far east as Europe, taking us inside soldiers' tents, prisoner-of-war camps, plantations, tenements, churches, Indian reservations, and even the cargo holds of ships. They stress the war years, but also cast an eye at the tumultuous decades that preceded and followed the battlefield confrontations. An engrossing account of ordinary people caught up in life-shattering circumstances, A People at War captures how the Civil War rocked the lives of rich and poor, black and white, parents and children--and how all these Americans pushed generals and presidents to make the conflict a people's war.

Scott Nelson is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction and Steel Drivin' Man: The Untold Story of John Henry and the Birth of an American Legend. Carol Sheriff is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862. (Text supplied by the publisher.)

New and Noteworthy: The Civilians' Civil War in Petersburg, VA

Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War, A. Wilson Greene,
Hardcover, 384 pages, University of Virginia Press (Winter, 2007), ISBN: 0813925703

In the past ten years, the urban and civilian aspect of the American Civil War has started to be addressed. Gettysburg, Atlanta, New York City, Charleston, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Knoxville have been received attention. Greene, historian working at Pamplin Park, Virginia and author of essays considering the character and memory Stonewall Jackson, addresses the urban wartime history of Peterburg, Virginia

Few wartime cities in Virginia held more importance than Petersburg. It's written history has lacked both an adequate military and civilian home front work. The noted Civil War historian A. Wilson Greene now provides an expertly researched and eloquently written study of the Virginia city that was second only to Richmond in size and strategic significance. Industrial, commercial, and extremely prosperous, Petersburg was home to a large African American community, including the state's highest percentage of free blacks.

On the eve of the Civil War, the city elected a conservative, pro-Union approach to the sectional crisis. Little more than a month before Virginia's secession did Petersburg finally express pro-Confederate sentiments, at which point the city threw itself wholeheartedly into the effort, with large numbers of both white and black men serving. Over the next four years, Petersburg's citizens watched their once-beautiful city become first a conduit for transient soldiers from the Deep South, then an armed camp, and finally the focus of one of the Civil War's most physically and environmentally damaging campaigns.

At war's end, Petersburg's antebellum prosperity evaporated under pressures from inflation, chronic shortages, and the extensive damage done by Union artillery shells. Greene's book tracks both Petersburg's civilian experience and the city's place in Confederate military strategy and civilian administration. Employing unpublished sources, the book weaves a uniquely personal story of thousands of citizen-free blacks, slaves and their holders, factory owners, merchants-all of whom shared a singular experience in Civil War Virginia.

(Source: in part, Book Description, Amazon.com)