Civil War slaughter and Lt. Abraham
The Civil War and Reconstruction are hot topics, again. Proof?
For one, the loud and at times violent skirmishing over Confederate statuary. For another, the renewal of the reparations debate. Finally, a spate of new books, including “Stony the Road” by Henry Louis Gates Jr., dealing with the opportunities lost in the war’s aftermath.
April marks the 158th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. One of the soldiers of that war, James Abraham of Fayette County, posted letters from the field to relatives in Smithfield. Later collected and published, these narratives speak to the war’s violence and its frequently startling consequences.
The war both steeled Lieutenant Abraham’s resolve and softened his regard for the soldiers on the opposite side of the battleline. This phenomenon may help explain why the Northern war generation was so eager to reconcile with their Southern brethren following the war, to the detriment of freed slaves and the whole country’s social and racial future.
“Bill,” James Abraham wrote, addressing a brother at home, “my imagination of a battlefield has fallen far short of the terrible realities.”
Abraham’s letter was posted on the final day of September 1862. The previous six weeks or so had been a period of almost unrelieved agony for the fighting men of the North and South. Sixteen months earlier they had marched so grandly to war, but now that seemed long ago.
August 1862 ended with the second Battle of Bull Run at the town of Manassas, Virginia. September brought the Battle of South Mountain followed by the slaughterhouse of Antietam, fought in the vicinity of the small creek of the same name near Sharpsburg, Maryland.
Lieutenant Abraham entered this whirlwind of battles a hard-war man. Writing his brother on August 7, he declared that “better our land should be drenched in blood” than torn asunder by “treason, slavery and despotism.”
He would fight the rebels any time, any where, and given some measure of Union leadership, win. The “seceshs” were “cowardly,” lowdown and lacking in principles, he thought, hardly worthy opponents for the Union’s God-fearing legions.
Now, pondering the sight of Union boys ministering to wounded Confederates – there were many such scenes at Antietam – Abraham said one thought came to mind: how “unnatural” this war, “pitting countrymen against countrymen.”
And still, “when I think of my country and that its salvation leads through such scenes I still think it unnatural but yet with us it is right.”
Enlisting with the First West Virginia Cavalry not long after the first Battle of Bill Run, Abraham found himself in the spring of 1862 encamped at Shady Springs, Virginia (current-day West Virginia), railing against the guerrilla bands “which now more than ever infest the country.”
Bushwhackers were the bain of the federals. These irregular troops did a good day’s work by harassing and disrupting: tearing down telegraph lines, ripping up railroad tracks, and picking off isolated Union pickets.
Their conduct incensed Union soldiers for reasons not hard to understand. On a gloomy, rainy night in August 1861, Abraham and 17 other Union troops rode over some of the toughest, wildest terrain in all of western Virginia in search of his friend and fellow-Fayette countian John DeBolt, a missing Union skirmisher.
About 18 miles from camp, alongside a muddy mountain road, the squad came upon DeBolt’s body. It was clear to Abraham that his friend was the victim of a single gunshot wound to the chest. To insure their work, however, the guerrillas had expended another shell to rip open DeBolt’s head; cruelly, “the devils” had used the dead man’s own carbine. The bushwhackers then “stripped DeBolt of coat, hat and socks and rifled his pockets.” In an angry note home, Abraham declared, “No more prisoners is the watchword of all who saw or hear of the fate of poor DeBolt.”
“Nothing short of driving the whole population out of the country or complete annihilation will stop this cowardly warfare.”
Abraham was deeply, profoundly frustrated. A long war had not seemed possible when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. The North expected to vanquish the South in a matter of weeks. The thing had yet to occur.
The commander of the Union army, General George McClellan, blamed the Lincoln administration, and the cry was taken up by some under his command.
“All we asked of Uncle Abe,” Abraham wrote, “is to give us their numbers.” With parity, the army would “march straight to Richmond and clean up the bushwhackers as we go.”
Abraham spotted knavery everywhere. “Stopping the wind” of the South’s northern sympathizers should be a war measure. “If there is anything on God’s green earth I’d love to hate it would be a Northern Rebel or Traitor,” Abraham said.
As winter turned to the spring and summer of 1862, James Abraham’s anger was unabated. “Who is to blame” for the slow pace of the Union advance? he wrote in a letter home on July 5, 1862. “I can not believe it rests with the rank and file of the Army. Can it be in the counsels of Washington or does it rests with the leaders in the field?”
Abraham saw in the Union cause something close to holy. He was ready to sacrifice all. “Better for humanity that this and the next generation should be draped in mourning than our glorious institutions perish and freedom and Democracy bow to slavery.”
The slaughter of August and September of that year tempered Abraham’s blood lust. It did nothing to diminish his belief in the righteous cause of the Union.
After it became known that President Lincoln, in the wake of Northern success at Antietam, would issue a slavery emancipation proclamation at the start of 1863, the plain soldier Abraham said, “It is right.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com