Author Q&A: Theodore Savas and "The Indispensable Man"

The site's long-running Q&A feature ends its rather long hiatus with the return of Theodore Savas. Ted wore his publisher's hat for our 2007 interview, but today we will be talking about his newest work on the authorial side of things: The Indispensable Man: George Washington Rains, the Confederate Powder Works, and the Civil War You Never Knew.

CWBA: Welcome back, Ted. It has often been said that no Confederate army lost a battle because of a lack of arms, powder, and shot. However, a wider reading uncovers a number of challenges to that long accepted claim. For example, antiquated arms were a key factor in the early-war Confederate defeat at Mill Springs and, accurately or not, bad powder was blamed for the mid-war loss to a much smaller Union force at Honey Springs. Also, in a general sense, defective shells and obsolete artillery dramatically impacted Confederate hitting power on a multitude of battlefields. What are your thoughts on the matter?

TS: This first question deserves a full reply, so here we go.

You’re right to challenge it, and so do I. That line is one of the most durable myths of the war. It survives and thrives because of what I call reverse-engineered thinking: the Confederacy fought for four years, none of the big-name battles were lost because of a lack of munitions, so it always had the means to fight a long war. It didn’t have the means to fight a war at all in 1861, and it lost a lot of engagements because of a lack of powder. Let me dig into this a bit more.

When George Rains sat down in a Richmond hotel room with Jefferson Davis and Josiah Gorgas on July 8, 1861, for what was essentially a final job interview in a meeting no one has ever written about, not a pound of military-grade powder was being made anywhere in the South. Davis put him in charge of locating, designing, and building a mammoth central government gunpowder mill from scratch to supply the entire war effort east of the Mississippi. We will come back to this later.

You noted Mill Springs. General Crittenden attacked in the rain on January 19, 1862, at the far eastern end of Johnston’s line three months before the Augusta Powder Works began production. We don’t have precise records of what the Confederates fighting there had at that time, and the powder they did have was probably subpar—wet and poorly made. The previous October, General Zollicoffer and some of his officers were complaining that they did not have two rounds of ammunition per man, and that artillery had arrived with empty shells.

After the Augusta Powder Works went into operation in April of 1862, no significant defeat east of the Mississippi River took place because of a lack of gunpowder. Before that, during the war’s first year, there are multiple examples of major defeats in several states directly related to a lack of powder. Rains and the Augusta mill, except for one small shipment, did not send powder to the Trans-Mississippi, but I have a significant amount of information about just how bad the powder was out there and the consequences.

Take Honey Springs. That was a quality problem, and the evidence is stronger than “accurately or not” suggests. That summer, Gen. William Steele complained that the powder he received from San Antonio “looks well when first opened, but attracts moisture to such an extent that exposure to damp weather converts it into a paste. The troops have no confidence in it.” Gen. Kirby Smith wrote about this in March 1864: Mexican powder made with nitrate of soda instead of nitrate of potash “caused our troops to be defeated on the Arkansas, and resulted in the loss of the greater portion of the Indian Territory.” None of that powder came from Augusta; it all came from Mexico by order of Richmond.

You’re right about “hitting power,” though that term has different applications. At Charleston in 1863, Beauregard complained that not more than one-fifth of the fuses he’d been sent “burst properly or with accuracy.” Rains watched the batteries engage the Union fleet and was alarmed by what he witnessed: “I regret to say that of the many shells I saw fired from our batteries at the enemy from the 10 inch Columbiad, but few fuzes took fire and hence the ammunition and projectiles were expended without effect.” But the problem was never Augusta powder, which was routinely tested. The lack of “hitting power” in my view came not only from bad fuses but from weak powder made in smaller state-run or quasi-private mills, especially in New Orleans. I mention this in more detail in a later answer below.

To summarize: once Augusta was running at full stride, from April 1862 and thereafter, the claim holds up reasonably well for quantity and quality east of the Mississippi. There was neither quantity nor much quality during the first year of the war anywhere, and this was true west of the river as well for essentially the entire war.

CWBA: There are a lot of senior Confederate/militia officers named Rains for Civil War readers to keep track of, including Gabriel Rains of the torpedo bureau, James E. Rains (killed leading his brigade at Stones River), James S. Rains (a Missouri State Guard brigadier primarily known for his alcoholism and military incompetence), and your Rains, George Washington Rains. For those not familiar with him, can you provide a short capsule bio?

TS: Even the newspapers couldn’t keep them straight. In July 1861, while George Rains was meeting Tennessee’s governor in Nashville, papers from Buffalo to Dallas were arguing over whether the “Gen. Rains” fighting in Missouri was the Major Rains who had been running an iron works in New York and had gone South. He wasn’t.

George Washington Rains was born in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1817, the younger brother of Gabriel of torpedo and landmine fame. Their father built fine furniture and cheap caskets, went broke, and moved the family to Alabama one step ahead of his creditors. George graduated from West Point first in chemistry and third in the class of 1842 (Longstreet, Rosecrans, D. H. Hill, and Abner Doubleday were classmates; Mansfield Lovell was his roommate).

He served as an engineer and artillery officer, taught chemistry at West Point, and had a remarkable Mexican War career as a spy, engineer, and combat staff officer for Gens. Winfield Scott and Gideon Pillow. In 1856, George married into one of the richest families in America (that’s a crazy story), resigned from the U.S. Army, and moved to upstate New York, where he helped manage and grow his father-in-law’s Washington Iron Works at Newburgh. He was a wealthy man by the time his home state of North Carolina seceded. He was also in communication with Richmond, which was trying to get him to join the Confederacy for a specific task. He left his wife and young daughter in June 1861 and traveled to Richmond, a move that permanently estranged him from his father-in-law; his marriage never fully recovered.

While designing and building the two-mile-long Augusta mill complex, he traveled to every state east of the Mississippi. He turned Tennessee’s lone blasting mill into a viable operation late in the year and helped design a second mill from scratch; without these, Albert Sidney Johnston could not have maintained any Western Theater line.

The Augusta mill was the only permanent industrial complex or construction project the Confederacy finished. Rains had a myriad of complex important duties, eventually commanded several arsenals, and during the war’s final weeks served as the Confederacy’s de facto chief of ordnance. He ended the war as a colonel but was probably promoted to brigadier during the final days.

He remained in Augusta, taught chemistry, served as dean of the Medical College of Georgia, and wrote several textbooks. He returned to Newburgh in 1894 after his father-in-law died, and died there himself in 1898.

CWBA: The Indispensable Man is clearly more than a Civil War biography that follows the standard format. How would you describe what kind of book it is?

TS: It is three books, threaded together under the primary rubric of biography.

First, it’s a full biography. George Rains led five very different lives: birth to West Point, a distinguished career in the Old Army, a prosperous stretch as an industrialist and family man in New York, four years as the Confederacy’s powdermaker, and three decades as a teacher and college dean in Augusta. His prewar years are covered in full because you can’t understand what he was able to achieve during the Civil War without understanding how he built his talent stack.

Second, it’s an industrial and logistics history. That might sound boring, but it’s edge-of-your-seat front-row coverage of a shadow war you have never known. You’ll learn more about powder than you probably want to, but you must be versed in this if you study the war at any serious level. Most historians have no idea how hard and complex powder was to make, and why pistols, small arms, field artillery, and coastal guns all needed different grains of powder. They aren’t interchangeable. Making it and distributing it to where it needed to go was a nightmare that never ended. That gap in knowledge has distorted what historians have written, and how they and we have read and understand the war. Please note that this is not a criticism. I didn’t know much about this either until I began studying it.

Third, and this is what surprised me most, The Indispensable Man is a history of the strategy of the war told through the lens of gunpowder. Rains and the Augusta Powder Works are inextricably linked to grand strategy, and not indirectly. I have the firsthand accounts to prove it.

There were eye-popping shortages everywhere, at every level, nearly all the time during the war’s first year. This was true even in Virginia, where the Confederates hoarded most of what they seized from the U.S. arsenals and forts.

All of this raises a hard question about the other side: what did the Lincoln administration know and when did it know it? Lincoln and everyone in any position of power knew the South had very little powder and could not replace what little it had. Major newspapers like the New York Times explained the complexities of making powder, why the Confederacy could not make it quickly, and it specifically warned Lincoln not to give Jefferson Davis what he needed most: the time to develop a central mill to reach a war footing.

Despite all this knowledge, the United States adopted a long-war strategy for a conflict that could have ended quickly regardless of who was tactically victorious in the field. Pulling triggers and yanking lanyards anywhere—even vigorously sustained skirmishing—would have drained the Confederacy within weeks. I know that statement raises eyebrows, but I cover this in depth with numbers and firsthand accounts. Everyone of consequence on both sides knew this. The Confederate War Department reports it produced for itself and for the Congress shocked everyone—and not in a good way. The math was undeniable. If Lincoln pressed them, the war was over. You have never heard or read this because it never made it into the books.

The footnotes are almost a fourth book. They are deep and explanatory, and I urge everyone to read them carefully. All my work is there.

CWBA: In your introduction, you recount your experience of one of any scholarly endeavor’s greatest frustrations: being flatly denied access to key manuscript material. Did that top official with the county museum you referenced offer a reason why you couldn’t examine the Rains papers they held?

TS: Not specifically, but I think he was embarrassed that I flew in from California and had to point out what was jammed into drawers on an upper floor and what they really were. He called them “some Confederate drawings.” I explained what they were, why they were important, that only a few had ever been seen, and that they were the Rosetta Stone of Confederate industry. He was English, not American, and he was more interested in geology and dinosaurs than he was in history. He was not a helpful man. It was maddening.

The good news is that the story didn’t end there. Years later the museum had a new curator, Gordon Blaker, who understood exactly what he had. Those drawings became the foundation of Never for Want of Powder (2007).

CWBA: What was it about Rains’s background and skill set that made him a strong fit to manage the Augusta Powder Works?

TS: No one else in the Confederacy combined what he brought to the table, and no one else could have performed that task. That is not hyperbole. He had broad and deep experience in chemistry, science in general, math, teaching, engineering, and military science, as well as combat experience and years spent managing a major industrial complex in New York, where he learned business, logistics, shipping, hiring, firing, management, production schedules, and a lot more. If he had never married into the Ramsdell family and run the Washington Iron Works, he could never have designed, built, and managed the Augusta Powder Works. New York was a dress rehearsal, but of course he didn’t know that at the time. Quite literally, no one else had that talent stack. No one. And Rains used all of it to achieve what he did.

CWBA: You mention that this is a book decades in the making. One of the stops along the way was the publication of Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia (U. of S. Carolina Press, 2007) that you co-authored. Between then and now did you discover new sources that revised your understanding of what was presented in the 2007 study?

TS: Great question. Never for Want of Powder was a team effort led by Chip Bragg and blended several disciplines. My part was the Rains biographical chapters. The main subject was the works themselves: the architecture, the machinery, the process, and Charles Ross’s careful reconstruction of the production records. That research holds up, and I cite it often in my new book. What I found in the years following its publication changed my understanding of Rains and all that he did and why, and changed the book I thought I was writing into something quite different.

In 2010, I obtained a 30-page handwritten memorandum Rains wrote during the war’s final months. It had never been published or used in any manner. Unfortunately, like a lot of Rains items it ends mid-sentence, so it could have been 100 pages. I have no way of knowing. The candid memorandum walks through his entire service in personal and opinionated terms. It confirms his meeting with Davis and Gorgas and that he left Richmond for Nashville the same afternoon he got his orders. It explains all he did and why and offers chilling descriptions of how Albert Sidney Johnston was completely unprepared for combat of any kind for months on end during the fall and winter of 1861-62, and how worried Johnston, Rains, et al. were that Union forces would advance and force them to expend what little powder they had.

Second, the advent of digital research unlocked scores of sources and connected the dots. In January 2020, I started running keyword searches in the Official Records. If a document isn’t in the index, you’ll never find it, and the index is far from complete. Searching for “powder” and other keywords important to my study turned up letters, telegrams, and reports I’d never seen, from generals, governors, arsenal officers, citizens—you name it. I ended up compiling my own index of all 128 volumes, tailored to my study.

All these documents said the same basic thing: we have no powder, few or no shells, and if attacked cannot hold our positions. This was true of virtually every fort, city, coastal area, and field force large and small. The first time or two I read that I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Then I learned that the Confederate War Department knew the problem was widespread. The common reply from Richmond was that it would send powder only to whomever was being threatened or attacked—when and if it could get powder. Meanwhile, hold on and show a bold front. The “Huh, that’s interesting” morphed into “My God, this was everywhere, and they could not hold, if pressed, anywhere.”

Searches in newspapers (worldwide) and letter books from arsenals and depots, compiled service records, and more uncovered a deeper treasure trove that supported and expanded on all this. I found so much I could not even use it all. My research produced a picture of a very different war than the one in the books.

The third was the discovery of a critically important, misfiled Jefferson Davis document that tied all this together to strategy. As far as I can tell, no one had ever used it, including his biographers and any other writers who would have had a deep interest in doing so. It’s not even in his collected papers. I shared it with a couple of Davis historians, and they admitted that they had never seen it. William C. Davis, a good friend of mine who read my manuscript, told me it surprised him and raised serious questions, especially about how the first year of the war was fought.

To summarize, these sources unlocked and explained two things. First, they put Rains’s heretofore unknown work for General Johnston in Tennessee (and in other states) in 1861 in proper context, and second, they reframed the strategy of the entire first year of the war. (I won’t get into it here, but it also alters, in my opinion, how we must look at the last eight or so months of the end of the war.) I have studied the Civil War for 50 years. I had never seen any of this.

CWBA: You estimate that Rains’s facilities produced over 3 million pounds of quality military-grade powder between April 1862 and April 1865. Of the combined total of domestically produced powder and that imported through the blockade over the length of the war, around what percentage was manufactured at Augusta?

TS: I’d love to give you a clean number, but no one can do it honestly, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who claims to be able to do so. It was clearly the large majority of all the powder available after April 1862.

The Augusta side of the equation is solid. Charles Ross worked through the daily ledgers and found the works made 3,168,450 pounds between April 1862 and April 1865, nearly half a million pounds more than Rains himself claimed. The import side is not. We know about individual cargoes, but there is no complete count, and the surviving figures often disagree. Estimates of the powder the Fingal brought into Savannah in 1861, for example, range from 17,000 pounds to 48 tons! In addition, a lot of imported powder arrived wet and often ruined. Much of it had to be reworked. How much was ruined or lost is unknown.

What I can say with confidence is that among domestic producers east of the Mississippi, Augusta dwarfed everyone else. The two Tennessee mills Rains established and/or reorganized and equipped were vital but small affairs and short-lived. Records for the mill at Columbia, South Carolina, have never been found, and that powder was for the Navy. The two North Carolina mills (one private and the other a quasi-state affair) blew themselves up repeatedly, and records are scarce. The two small South Carolina blasting mills at Pendleton and Walhalla turned out powder that was so bad that the Confederate government stopped working with them early in the war. Mansfield Lovell eventually erected two mills in New Orleans. Neither produced good powder. One blew up at the end of 1861, and the powder from the other was so bad that gunners watched their shells arc out of the barrels and drop into the water.

CWBA: With demand for Augusta powder coming from all parts of the Confederacy, how was distribution prioritized?

TS: Calls came routinely from all compass points, all the time. We know to the pound where it went, and it was mostly dictated by threat and need. A significant amount of correspondence among Rains, Josiah Gorgas, and the War Department, of course, is missing, but Richmond decided where the big shipments went, and that often meant whoever was in the most danger that month. When John Pemberton needed powder for Vicksburg in January 1863, for example, he didn’t wire Augusta. He wired Gorgas: “Please order General Rains, at Augusta, to send me at once 30,000 pounds of powder. Must have it immediately.”

Most of the powder went to arsenals. Richmond, Charleston, and the Augusta Arsenal received the most, and they turned it into the cartridges and fixed ammunition for the main field armies and the heavy guns. Beyond them, Rains shipped to about two dozen points east of the Mississippi. The records are detailed enough, for example, that we know what the major posts received, to the pound, and when. The daily records are incredibly detailed, and I include a full appendix breaking down the racial makeup of the employees and the skilled and unskilled laborers who ran the mill.

The priorities shifted with the fighting. Tons went to Lee before the Gettysburg campaign, and then more in its aftermath. Rains sent 100,000 pounds of columbiad powder to Mobile in the months preceding Farragut’s attack in 1864, and several tons to Wilmington in the run-up to Fort Fisher’s fall. There was often a cost to these choices. In April 1863, for example, with most of the powder cars headed up the coast to Charleston and Lee, the Macon laboratory (and I think an arsenal or two) shut down for a time for want of powder of all types. That meant the Army of Tennessee and other forces suffered a shortage, temporarily.

Geography set its own limits and restrictions. Getting powder to Selma, Alabama, or Jackson or Vicksburg, Mississippi, meant unloading trains onto wagons, then boats, then trains again, because the railroads didn’t connect. Rains had picked Augusta partly because it sat at the hinge of the Southern rail network between the two halves of the Confederacy, but even the best location couldn’t fix a railroad system that was never designed to work as one united artery.

CWBA: You also mention that Rains’s efforts in Tennessee over the latter half of 1861 are equally deserving of approbation. What did he accomplish during that time and how do you rate its significance?

TS: This is part of his story virtually no one has ever heard about, and I might rank it as important as Augusta. The completion of the Augusta Powder Works made it possible for the Confederacy to fight a long war. Rains’s work in Tennessee helped the Confederacy survive the first year to finish the Augusta mill so it could fight a long war. But for his work in Tennessee and the Western Theater (while he was simultaneously building the Augusta complex), the war would never have stretched beyond one year. Indeed, he, Johnston, and others were shocked they made it through the fall of 1861. Previous writers focus on Johnston’s lack of firearms (and only occasionally mention powder, though without context of what it really meant). That was not really the issue. Even if the Confederates had had triple the number of rifled muskets and artillery pieces they needed, it would have done them no good because they had no gunpowder and little or no niter to make it.

As Rains often noted, Johnston (and his lieutenants) could not fight more than a long skirmish. “There was no remedy,” wrote Rains, “until I could manufacture it for him [Johnston].” Without those mills and the niter refinery Rains built in Nashville (you can’t make military powder without pure niter, and it was the only refinery in the entire Confederacy at that time), there’s no defense of Kentucky, no defense of the major rivers, no Forts Henry and Donelson, no New Madrid and Island No. 10, and no Shiloh. By the time Johnston died at Shiloh, his army had the powder it needed for a major battle or two, and nearly all of it can be traced back to what Rains built from the ground up in Tennessee during the second half of 1861 and early 1862.

Fortunately for the Confederacy, it was at that precise moment in time (April 1862) that the Augusta Powder Works came online. It had taken nine months to finish, and the first month of production was woefully inadequate. Had the works come online just one month later, say in May 1862, Lee probably could not have fought the Seven Days’ Battles to save Richmond. It was that close. It’s not a coincidence that the Confederates were able to gather a large army around Richmond, fight there, and then carry the offensive north all the way into Maryland. None of that would have been possible if Rains had failed, or if President Davis had not had the foresight to erect a massive central powder mill.

All of this spans multiple chapters in great depth in my book. I don’t want to give too much away, because I think it is important for students to read and grasp all of this new information, and I am only sharing a tiny slice of what I have discovered. And as I noted earlier, all of this is in the notes so readers can look it up themselves.

CWBA: Thanks, Ted. You've left us with much to ponder. I am sure I join a great many in wanting to read more about these matters. Readers, The Indispensable Man is scheduled for release from Savas Beatie in the latter half of November so keep an eye out for it next month.

Author Q&A: Charles McLandress on "Ink, Dirt and Powder Smoke: The Civil War Letters of William F. Keeler, Paymaster on the USS Monitor"

The CWBA author interview feature returns with a new Q&A session, this time with Charles W. McLandress, editor of Ink, Dirt and Powder Smoke: The Civil War Letters of William F. Keeler, Paymaster on the USS Monitor. Civil War naval historians consider the Keeler correspondence among the top rank of firsthand accounts of the conflict afloat, and this is the first publication to reproduce those letters in full.

CWBA: Thank you for joining us, Charles. Your author bio reveals that you are the great-great-grandson of Paymaster Keeler. In your experience up to now, was his Civil War service still a topic of discussion in family circles?

CM: Thank you, Drew, for inviting me to do this interview. Unfortunately, no one in my immediate family is particularly interested in the American Civil War. Our dinner table conversations tend to revolve around what the kids learned at school and why the Maple Leafs never make it beyond the first round of the playoffs.

CWBA: Where do Keeler’s letters reside today? Does the family still possess any of his original writings or wartime mementos?

CM: A decade after the end of the Civil War Keeler bound his letters in a book that he entitled My Naval Experience. That “letter book” now resides at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, MD. How the book got there is itself an interesting story: Following the death of Keeler’s wife Anna in 1901, the book passed to their only surviving child Elizabeth who in 1926 sold it to Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, a collector of rare books and manuscripts. The book remained in Rosenbach’s possession for nearly two decades, during which time he offered it for sale to soon-to-be-President Franklin D. Roosevelt and listed it in his 1938 sales catalogue for a whopping $24,000 (roughly $500,000 today!). Rosenbach sold the letter book to the Naval Academy in 1943, along with other naval material, for an undisclosed amount of money. My family has none of Keeler’s original writings. My grandmother attributes that state of affairs to a fire that destroyed her mother’s house in Berkeley, CA in 1923 along with all of the family records stored therein.

Only a handful of Keeler’s mementos have survived; none of them are from the Civil War. All that is in my possession is a silver fork inscribed with “Paymaster” on the front and “United States Steamer Monitor” on the back and several of his business cards. A distant cousin of mine has photos of Keeler and his wife.

CWBA: Civil War naval historians often cast a jealous eye toward their army counterparts when it comes to the number and richness of available firsthand accounts. Aside from Keeler’s letters, how many Monitor crew correspondence collections, journals, and memoirs exist?

CM: As far as I know the only other collection of letters from someone who served on the Monitor are those of 1st Class Fireman George S. Geer, which are a far cry from Keeler’s vivid letters. There are a number of accounts of the battle with the CSS Virginia and the sinking of the Monitor written by several of the officers and crew of the Monitor. However, since those accounts were written long after the war, they lack the immediacy and vividness of Keeler’s contemporaneous letters.

CWBA: The significance of the Keeler letters to scholars is unquestioned. What service-related topics did he write about that are, in your view, most uniquely valuable? How would you describe his writing style?

CM: Since, as paymaster, Keeler had neither an active role in the operation or management of the vessels on which he served nor a station in battle, he was ideally suited to observe and record events. With a keen eye for detail and an agile pen he was the perfect chronicler. His vivid description of the epic naval battle between the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia in Hampton Roads, VA on March 9, 1862 is in my opinion his most uniquely valuable contribution to naval history. Since he was the person who transmitted the verbal messages between the pilot house where the captain was stationed and the turret where the two guns were located, he was uniquely placed to accurately describe the battle, which he did in vivid detail. The fact that the Monitor’s captain John Worden, who was injured during the battle, did not write an official report about the battle, makes Keeler’s account even more valuable. In addition, Keeler’s detailed descriptions of other engagements, such as the failed ironclad attack on Fort Darling on the James River near Richmond on May 15, 1862 are also important. With an eye for detail Keeler also described in detail his responsibilities as a Civil War naval paymaster. Those descriptions are more numerous in his letters from the USS Florida.

In describing Keeler’s writing style the words that come to mind are wonderfully vivid, descriptive, colorful, graphic, forceful, insightful, thoughtful, and at times humorous.

CWBA: What are some of your favorite episodes/anecdotes from the Keeler letters?

CM: Keeler’s accounts of their nearly disastrous trip to Hampton Roads and the ensuing battle with the CSS Virginia and the sinking of the USS Monitor off Cape Hatteras, NC on December 31, 1862 are of course at the top of my list. His descriptions of the naval blockade of the Confederate port city of Wilmington while he was serving on the USS Florida, in particular the excitement of chasing blockade runners, also make for great reading. Surprisingly, what impressed me the most were his vivid descriptions of people he encountered during the war.

Here are three nice examples of the latter:

Keeler’s description of President Lincoln’s visit to the Monitor on May 7, 1862 is particularly moving:

“Mr. Lincoln had a sad, care worn & anxious look in strong contrast with the gay cortege by which he was surrounded. As the boat which brought the party came along side every eye sought the Monitor but his own. He stood with his face averted as if to hide some disagreeable sight. When he turned to us I could see his lip quiver & his frame tremble with strong emotion & imagined that the terrible drama in these waters of the ninth [eighth] & tenth [ninth] of March was passing in review before him. As the officers were introduced I was presented as being from his own state. He was very happy he said to find one from Illinois on board the Monitor. He examined everything about the vessel with care, manifesting great interest. His remarks evidently shewing that he had carefully studied what he thought to be our weak points & that he was well acquainted with all the mechanical details of our construction. Most of our visitors come on board filled with enthusiasm & patriotism, ready, like a bottle of soda water, to effervesce the instant the cork is withdrawn. But with Mr. Lincoln it was different. His few remarks as he accompanied us around the vessel were sound, simple & practical. The points of admiration & exclamation he left to his suite. Before he left he had the crew mustered on the Spar deck & passed slowly before them hat in hand. It gives me pleasure to say, & I record it to his credit, that he declined the invitation to whiskey but took a glass of ice water.”

While the USS Florida was at Beaufort, NC taking on coal and supplies, Keeler and several fellow officers went to one of the nearby sandy islands for a clam bake. There on January 28, 1864 they encountered a poor white named “Aunt Peggy” about whom Keeler had the following to say:

“The only peculiarity about our visit on this occasion was a call on “Aunt Peggy” & I wish you could have been a witness to it. The house was made of rough board from the common yellow pine of the country, with cracks on all sides through which the chickens could almost run—one room which answered for kitchen, chamber & parlour for the family which I should have said were some of the “poor white trash” of the country & consisted as far as I could see of “Aunt Peggy” & two daughters, one of whom was married & her husband & three children went to make up the occupants of the single room. Two rough bedsteads, three chairs & a rough pine table comprised the furniture. Upon showing ourselves at the door, Aunt Peggy invited us to “walk in gentleman” & take some chairs. As I found that five of us couldn’t comfortably be seated in three chairs I was upon the point [of] seating myself upon one of the beds when Aunt Peggy rushed up with “Oh don’t set on the baby,” to which very reasonable request I of course assented & turning down a corner of the quilt brought to light a very pretty plump blue eyed baby . . . The two beds, which looked as if they had been “slept in forever & never made up,” occupied one end of the room. Opposite was the rude fire place, the hearth strewn with a motley collection of pine chips, dead embers, live coals & oyster shells, flanked by an old iron teakettle & a lazy dog. An application to “Aunt Peggy” for some water brought forth a reply something after this fashion—“Reckon there ain’t any. Dis yere tide’s so low it’s all gin out, but I kin give yer some right smart yaupon [tea].” . . . My curiosity to taste the beverage was conquered by conscientious scruples against consuming more than “my peck of dirt.” Some of the others who were not detered by trifles declared it tasted like a mingling of sage, catnip & boneset, flavored with quinine. I suppose they were fair specimens of the poor whites of the south. They declared themselves good Union folks, & I think truly so.”

In July 1865 the USS Florida transported four of the Lincoln assassination conspirators to a prison in the Florida Keys. They were Dr. Samuel Mudd (who set the broken leg of assassin John Wilkes Booth when he was on the run), Edmund Spangler (a carpenter and stagehand at Ford’s Theater where Lincoln was shot), Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen (both involved in two failed attempts to kidnap Lincoln). The following excerpt has been combined from two of Keeler’s letters:

“We have on board the President’s murderers (the unhung ones), taking them to the Dry Tortugas where government is to furnish them (except Spangler) with a residence for the rest of their lives. Spangler goes for six years. I only regret that these [men] didn’t go with Mrs. Surratt to keep her company we should have been saved this trip down here. Like most all criminals they all claimed that they had been found guilty upon false evidence. Dr. Mudd had a good deal to say about the trial, pointing out the evidence where it clashed as he thought, giving the character of various witnesses, calling attention to points which he thought had been overlooked or had not received sufficient attention from the court. He had had the evidence in his case, pro & con, published in book form & produced a copy which he commended to our careful perusal. He is about 30 years of age, though he looks much older. He leaves a wife & four children. He is said to be a sharp shrewd man but I saw nothing about him to indicate it. He has a sort of cunning, foxy look, as if possessed of plenty of low cunning & a desire for concealment. The officers in charge of them & who have had a good opportunity of knowing say that “Mrs. Surratt & him furnished the brains for the party” & they think that he should have accompanied her to the gallows, that her fate was just & merited they have no doubt & that she had any claims, as a woman, on executive clemency they deny. Spangler is a coarse, rough, uneducated, unprincipled man. His bull neck, bullet head & brutish features mark a villain, but without sufficient nerve & steadiness to carry out the villainny his heart would prompt. He appears to take his punishment (six years) quite stoically & appears at times quite light hearted. He protests with any amount of profanity his entire innocence of the charge, but admits that he has committed crime enough of other kinds to merit the punishment so that his sentence is not undeserved. The other two [Arnold and O’Laughlen] are young men, quiet & still, saying but little except when spoken to—men of no more than ordinary information & intelligence. With the exception of Dr. Mudd who may have the ability to plan I cannot conceive how the execution of plans of such vast consequences to the rebels could have been entrusted to such kind of persons.”

CWBA: Along the spectrum of editorial approaches, from light to heavy, your work is clearly on the latter end. Can you describe what you were trying to accomplish as editor of the material?

CM: Since historians today are more interested in the personal and social aspects of the Civil War than they were in the past, I placed more emphasis on the people Keeler mentioned in his letters than did Robert Daly (the editor of the two volumes of Keeler’s letters published in the 1960s) who focused almost exclusively on naval and military matters. I did this by adding footnotes in the letters, as well as a biographical notes section at the end of the book. Award-winning Civil War historian William C. Davis, who reviewed an earlier version of the book, commented that “the editing is useful but never intrusive” and that “McLandress has done a skillful job of illuminating the letters with frequent contextual commentaries, and excellent annotation to identify people and places mentioned in the letters.” Since I also wanted to make the book accessible to anyone interested in American history and not just Civil War aficionados, I started each chapter with an introduction which provides the necessary background and contextual information to easily follow the letters.

CWBA: Along those lines (in regard to content and editing), how does your fresh edition compare to Robert Daly’s two volumes published back in the 1960s?

CM: Robert Daly omitted roughly 40% of the content of Keeler’s letters. This, in conjunction with numerous editorial notes inserted in the middle of the letters, breaks up the letters and makes for difficult reading. In Ink, Dirt & Powder Smoke, I included Keeler’s letters in their entirety and placed the editorial notes at the bottoms of the pages. This makes for much smoother reading, thus further enhancing the richness and vitality of his writing. Since a fair chunk of the material deleted by Daly pertains to people and personal matters, the inclusion of the omitted material helps to fill out Keeler’s relationship with his friends and family back home, as well as providing us with vivid descriptions of many of the people he encountered. Some notable omissions by Daly include Keeler’s wonderful half-page description of the African-American Siah Hulett Carter who escaped from Shirley Plantation where he was enslaved and served as a 1st Class Boy on the Monitor and later on the USS Florida where he rose to the rank of Ordinary Seaman. Another is Union general Michael Corcoran’s Irish Brigade at Newport News, VA, which Keeler described as “halt, lame, hump backs, decrepit old men, boys, everything in fact who would a sogering go,” with the remainder being made up of “wild irishmen from the vilest holes of New York City.” The colorful description of Aunt Peggy quoted above was also omitted by Daly. The inclusion of trivial matters such as where to pasture their cow, whether to use corn or oats to feed their hens, the state of their garden, his wish to be back home eating strawberries and cream with Anna, and many more helps to fill out home-life back in La Salle, Illinois.

Ink, Dirt and Powder Smoke includes a more in-depth discussion of Keeler’s life before and after the war. His growing up in Brooklyn, his work as a dry goods merchant in Bridgeport, CT, as well as his tragic trip to the California gold fields in 1849 where his two brothers died are discussed in much greater detail. The inclusion of the letters he wrote in the 1880s to a Connecticut collector named Frank H. Pierce who was gathering information about the Monitor (letters that were unavailable to Daly) give us Keeler’s final thoughts on the Monitor. These letters also provide a fitting end to his story since he was dying of heart disease as he wrote them. When he was too ill to write, Anna had to continue the correspondence. In her last letter to Pierce she wrote:

“The packing of the box was the last work Mr. Keeler ever did. The letter announcing its safe arrival reached him a day or two before his death and I told him of its contents. The keys of the safe of the Monitor that he had in his pocket when the vessel went down he left to our son and son in law.”

CWBA: The presentation of your book is very professional looking. Having gone through the entire process of self-publishing, are you satisfied with your decision and with the results? I would imagine that not having to submit to the abridgment compromises that Daly had to endure played a part in your decision-making.

CM: I am very happy with my decision to self-publish Keeler’s letters and very satisfied with the final result. Before going that route, however, I contacted the U.S. Naval Institute Press and several university presses about whether they would be interested in publishing a complete and unabridged version of Keeler’s letters. Given the length of my proposed book and the fact that an abridged version had already been published, they politely declined. Realizing that no publishing house would take on my project, I reached out to a friend of mine who self-publishes his own books. With some words of advice from him, I reformatted my MS word document for publication by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for paperback and by IngramSpark for both paperback and hardcover, and generated cover files for the books. The KDP paperback was published in July 2023 and the IngramSpark hardcover and paperback in September and December 2023, respectively. Since then I have been busy advertising the book, and to that end have built a website and a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/SealRiverPublishing/) to promote it. I have learned that self-publishing a book is the easy part, advertising it is not.

CWBA: Finally, I also found your website (https://www.sealriverpublishing.com) to be quite engaging. Can you share any plans for the future of Seal River Publishing?

CM: My website is the main vehicle for promoting my book. But it is actually much more than that, for it delves into my American-born mother’s family tree where a number of interesting characters lurk. My mother’s ancestors were from both the North and the South. Roughly three quarters were Southerners, with one third of them coming from a wealthy plantation in Louisiana. The remaining quarter were mainly Connecticut Yankees. The two sides came together when my great grandfather (a Northerner and the astronomer son of Paymaster Keeler) married my great grandmother (a Southerner from Oakley Plantation in Louisiana). In the Civil War, three of my Northern ancestors fought for the Union and six of the Southerners for the Confederacy.

I have two other book projects planned for Seal River Publishing. One is the letters of a great-great uncle of mine named Henry Melzar Dutton, who was a young lawyer in Connecticut when the Civil War broke out. He enlisted in a Connecticut infantry regiment in July 1861 and served in Nathaniel P. Banks’ army in western Maryland until the spring of 1862, in the Shenandoah Valley chasing Stonewall Jackson and finally in northern Virginia where he was killed at the Battle of Cedar Mountain in August 1862. Continuing down Paymaster Keeler’s branch of my mother’s family tree, I also plan a book containing the letters of Keeler’s grandson Henry Bowman Keeler who worked in China for the Standard Oil Company from 1915 until his death there at the age of 25 in 1918. Rich in detail and often very humorous, these letters provide a Westerner’s perspective of life in China during a period of great political upheaval when Western businessmen and missionaries, as well as Chinese river bandits and warlord generals’ armies, populated the landscape. My website has sample letters of Melzar Dutton and Henry Keeler, as well as a brief story of their lives.

Persons interested in learning more can subscribe to my mailing list on the website for updates to the webpage, as well as upcoming books, and follow my Facebook page for interesting posts about those books and the letter writers.

CWBA: Thank you, Charles. Readers, once again the title of Charles's book is Ink, Dirt and Powder Smoke: The Civil War Letters of William F. Keeler, Paymaster on the USS Monitor, available in both hardcover and paperback.

Author Q&A: Eric Faust on "The 6th Michigan Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War"

Eric R. Faust is the author of three books exploring the state of Michigan's contributions to the Union war effort. Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry was published in 2015 as part of Kent State University Press's Civil War in the North series, and his first regimental study, The 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War: A History and Roster , was released that same year by McFarland. Also from McFarland, Faust's most recent book, The 6th Michigan Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War: A History and Roster, was published back in March and is the topic of this interview.

CWBA: Thank you for joining us, Eric. You’ve now authored three Civil War books, all Michigan related. What inspired your particular interest in the 6th Michigan Volunteer Infantry regiment?

EF: It was a happy accident. My first book, Conspicuous Gallantry, presented the letters of a soldier in the 11th Michigan, James W. King. King’s future father-in-law, Darius Ambrose Babcock, enlisted as a private in the 6th Michigan late in the war, so I looked into his service. He was injured in a train wreck immediately after departing Michigan and served as an officer’s cook before being discharged for disability. Nothing too exciting, but that research brought out tantalizing hints that the 6th Regiment possessed a fascinating, and largely untold, story. Even by volunteer standards, they were a poorly behaved bunch, yet you sure wouldn’t want to face them on a battlefield. There was no way I could walk away from that—their story was begging for a book-length treatment.


CWBA: What do you enjoy most about researching and writing regimental histories?

EF: Unit histories offer the best of both worlds. Like campaign and battle studies, they narrate the sweeping scope of major historical events. At the same time, like biographies and published letter collections, they reveal the daily lives and inner thoughts of individual soldiers. By the end of a good regimental you’ve gotten to know several soldiers so well that they are old friends (or enemies) by the time you turn the last page. The regiment was the infantryman’s whole world, and these histories bring us closer to understanding daily life in the armies as well as what the war really meant in the eyes of those who fought it. And it never gets old, because that answer is different for every unit, every soldier. As a researcher and writer, I enjoy watching these stories unfold and observing (and sometimes reconciling) how men who witnessed the exact same events often perceived them very differently. I also find it rewarding to stumble across all kinds of interesting little incidents that would never make it into books on broader topics.


CWBA: Tell us about the early-war period of the 6th’s Civil War service in Maryland and the Eastern Shore of Virginia?

EF: The 6th Michigan started out attached to the Army of the Potomac and was stationed in Baltimore. The Michiganders and Marylanders were on surprisingly friendly terms. There was tension here and there to be sure, but the soldiers, by and large, were on their best behavior. And they were showered with kindnesses in return: one captain, for example, received seven invitations for Christmas dinner, and many of the men courted, and in some cases later married, local women. The citizens even petitioned the War Department to keep the 6th stationed there. But all of that proved so deceptive. The instant those same troops crossed the border into Virginia for the first time in November 1861, they exhibited two defining traits: first, an insatiable appetite for foraging (which would evolve into remorseless pillaging), and second, a seething, open defiance of their brigadier, which would only worsen under subsequent general officers.

The Eastern Shore expedition foreshadowed the Michiganders’ service along the Mississippi. First, Curtenius was unavailable (on court-martial duty), so the unit marched out under Major Bacon’s command. Bacon was incapable of managing his men, and discipline collapsed in enemy territory. Next, the expedition’s commanding officer, Brigadier General Henry Lockwood, was operating under orders from John Dix to treat Confederate civilians and their rights to property (human or otherwise) with respect, and that did not sit well with the Michiganders. When they encamped in enemy territory for the first time, one officer reported, “for miles around camp could be heard all night long, the squealing of pigs, squawking of geese, cackling of hens, and all kinds of noises.” This expedition was characterized by hard marching and no fighting, a combination that bred discontent. The climax came when Lockwood confronted the entire regiment in a rage over a stolen turkey. As he departed, according to one private, “the boys forgot all military discipline for the moment, and such cheers and imitating of the fowl captured I never heard; they fairly gobbled him out of camp, and the… general retired, baffled and discomfited, pouring out vile epithets upon the Michigan men.” Bacon later testified against Lockwood before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, effectively accusing him of treason for following Dix’s orders. This was a recurring theme with Bacon—lividly attacking the reputation of any superior officer who criticized or opposed him. He should have been more worried about himself: his own subordinates “came home tittering over the frivolity and lack of executive ability exhibited by Major Bacon.” Things got back to normal, though, once the men were back in Baltimore under Colonel Curtenius. That made it easy to blame everything on Bacon, but it wasn’t that simple.


CWBA: Serious discipline problems seem to be a common theme wherever the regiment went. As far as you can tell, what was the source of it, and how much blame do you lay at the feet of the officers (including Col. Curtenius, Lt. Col. Clark and Maj. Bacon)?

EF: Clark and Bacon were disciplinary disasters, but Colonel Curtenius was competent and respected. His enforcement was lax at times, typical for a volunteer officer, but he could step up when the situation called for it. For example, he unhesitatingly threw several men in the stockade for refusing to drill in protest of noncom pay rates. But the colonel was getting on in years, and his health failed him by the time the unit engaged in active operations. That raises the big 'what if' in this regiment’s history, because his successors failed their subordinates miserably. Clark was a drunkard and a shameless profiteer; Bacon was incapable not only of showing deference to superiors but also of performing a field officer’s command duties. He is a fascinating case. He authored an entire book covering the period from Baton Rouge to Port Hudson—less than one year—and that entire effort amounts to a thinly veiled smear campaign against his superiors, particularly targeting three officers who had him arrested on separate occasions. He was court-martialed twice and ultimately dismissed from the service. Bacon held so little regard for the truth that his book constitutes a minefield for historians because it is fascinating, well-written, and contains juicy gossip and useful information, yet it is also chock full of lies, both blatant and subtle. With all that being said, two different things had to happen for this unit’s demeanor to falter: first, Curtenius sickened and eventually resigned, leaving two lesser men in command; and second, a perfect storm of epidemics, logistical failures, guerrilla warfare, profiteering, and all the stresses incidental to active operations served as a catalyst to degrade morale and bring out the worst in everyone. This unit was ravaged by disease along the mosquito-infested Mississippi, losing a shocking 500 dead to sickness alone—far and away the record for any Michigan unit in the war.


CWBA: Sounds like their repeated flaunting of army regulations might also have extended to camp sanitation! Many Civil War volunteer units that played hell in camp and on the march redeemed themselves on the battlefield. Was this the case for the 6th Michigan at the Battle of Baton Rouge?

EF: Undeniably. One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of that phenomenon than what transpired with this regiment over just a two-month span in mid-1862. The 6th clashed with Brigadier General Thomas Williams, taunting him mercilessly at every opportunity. He was a regular army martinet if ever there was one, and he was disgusted with the regiment’s taste for plunder, so they were playing with fire. Sure enough, things got ugly fast. As punishment, Williams ordered the regiment out of its comfortable barracks in Baton Rouge to bivouac exposed to the debilitating Louisiana summer. Tents were available, yet they weren’t allowed to use them. Everyone knew this could only result in sickness and death. Curtenius was gone by then, and Clark, Bacon, and the two senior captains were all arrested, one after another, for disobeying the order to expose the men. This happened just prior to the Battle of Baton Rouge, so thanks to Williams the 6th Michigan entered a desperate fight in a sickly state and under the command of a captain who, until recently, was seventh in command. To make matters worse, Williams declined to fortify and arrayed his regiments outside of immediate supporting distance from each other. Those blunders put the Federals at a dire disadvantage. Then, at the outset of the fight, he split the already shorthanded 6th Michigan in the face of the enemy. With two companies already out on picket duty, he diverted one battalion of five companies to support the 21st Indiana, leaving just 3 isolated companies to hold the right flank.

The great irony here is that the arrests of Clark and Bacon—who would later prove themselves of highly dubious value under fire—enabled the regiment’s two finest captains to show their mettle and save the day. Each of them literally battled Confederate regiments with Union companies. Harrison Soule’s company foiled a flanking maneuver by the 6th Kentucky at Magnolia Cemetery, employing the bayonet. They endured 60 percent casualties, including Soule himself, and even then they withdrew only when ordered to do so. And John Corden routed Henry Watkins Allen’s brigade with those three aforementioned companies on the far right. The balance of the battalion at the cemetery (4 companies) fended off an entire brigade to hold the center.

Heroics like these would be famous if they had taken place in one of the big battles out east, and bear in mind that the 6th had never seen combat before. The rest of the brigade recognized all that: Sidney Bean of the 4th Wisconsin prefaced his comments on Corden’s performance with, “However incredible it may seem.” As the story goes, General Williams, the Michiganders’ greatest critic, was moved during the battle to say, “I wish to God I had ten thousand of you western thieves!” Whatever the truth of that, sources from multiple regiments assert that he was stunned to see his indisciplined volunteers fight tenaciously, and he complimented their courage profusely. High praise from a man who’d recently said he preferred conscripts to volunteers.


CWBA: Regimental histories are often useful vehicles for exploring obscure events that occurred behind the lines or on secondary fighting fronts. Can you talk about some little-known episodes of the 6th’s service in the West?

EF: Where to begin? I will pick out some highlights. Colonel Curtenius clashed with General Williams over the latter’s insistence that slaves should not be harbored from their masters. The Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves was passed and integrated into the Articles of War by then, yet Williams ordered the refugees expelled from the Union lines after one master demanded the 6th Michigan return his slave. Curtenius was arrested for his refusal, and then released hours later without comment or personal consequence. Williams would expel all the contrabands after Curtenius resigned—there was nobody left with the will and wherewithal to protect them.

Near Ponchatoula, the regiment once skirmished with Choctaws in the swamp and captured several. One captain quoted his comrades saying “there will be some civilization taught them,” though that seems to have been an idle threat. Illustrating the intensely personal scale on which the war was fought at times along the Mississippi, the first fatal fire the 6th Regiment ever took was from an irate plantation owner—on a rare occasion where the Michiganders actually intended to pay for farm goods. And the 6th once escaped a potential rout thanks to a delaying action fought by just eight soldiers who braved a concentrated assault while comrades skedaddled around them.

River travel was hazardous: the regiment’s transports drew artillery fire on four occasions, twice inflicting fatalities. It was traumatic to come under attack with little or no means to respond—they nearly capsized one vessel by herding to the port side when they came under fire from the starboard. After the second such assault, the regiment and its counterparts disembarked and pillaged the town from which they came under fire (Grand Gulf, Mississippi)—just one example where civilians paid the price when troops were frustrated by guerrilla tactics. Clark once squandered an important local naval asset, the partially ironclad gunboat Barataria, by apparently taking it to seek plunder while the ship’s commanding officer was absent. The vessel ran aground and was abandoned in response to an attack by a few dismounted cavalry [Now there’s an interesting trivia question: how many Union naval vessels were lost to cavalry actions?].

On one larger expedition, almost the entire regiment left the line of march to forage. “One could scarcely tell what place the 6th Michigan occupied in the line,” wrote one soldier, “there was a color bearer and a few commissioned officers." In March 1863 John C. Pemberton sent a message via the 6th Michigan to Nathaniel Banks, offering to trade cotton with the Department of the Gulf. I found no evidence that this gained any traction, but it was surely an eye-opening proposition that late in the war. The department suffered systemic logistical issues—the kind you normally associate with the Confederate army—and the Michiganders marched at times in bare feet, went hungry, drank infested swamp water, and so on. This is all just a sampling, but the experiences of isolated units often differed starkly from life in the larger armies out east.


CWBA: In summer 1863, the regiment found itself in the trench lines at Port Hudson. How did it fare there?

EF: Port Hudson was an unmitigated nightmare for the 6th. Nathaniel Banks was the worst kind of political general. He had no business leading an army, and half his force was comprised of nine-months men who, as one Michigander put it, “cannot tell the difference between an Enfield rifle and a ten-inch siege gun." The 6th went straight from having zero experience assaulting fortifications to joining in the longest siege in American history up to that point and participated in hopeless charges supported only by raw troops. The regiment went into Port Hudson with capable brigade and division commanders for a change (and even got along with them), but Generals Neal Dow and Thomas W. Sherman were both wounded straight away in the first assault on May 27, 1863. The Michiganders entered that engagement with 450 men and officers. By July 4, they could muster a mere 160 present for duty (they’d lost about one-third killed or wounded and another third to disease in the muck of the trenches). Corden, on Independence Day, was the sole officer present above the rank of lieutenant. After May 27, division command devolved to William Dwight, a rigid disciplinarian and heavy drinker (love that combination) already infamous for using volunteers as cannon fodder. Even Corden and Soule, heroes of Baton Rouge, refused to implement suicidal attack orders on separate occasions. Dwight went on to devise multiple schemes where a few soldiers were supposed to sneak into the Rebel fortifications under cover of darkness and somehow engineer the doom of an entire Confederate army. (Thirty thousand men couldn’t do it. Let’s try thirty instead.) Some of the 6th Michigan’s finest rank-and-file boys were shot dead in the dark following alcohol-inspired orders—and only days shy of surviving the last of their unit’s active combat operations.


CWBA: Interestingly, all of the regiments in Gen. Thomas Williams’s original brigade at Ship Island (21st Indiana, 4th Wisconsin, and 6th Michigan) were later converted to a different service branch (the 4th to the cavalry, and the 21st and 6th to the heavy artillery). At least for the 6th Michigan, what was the rationale behind the change?

EF: These conversions became almost commonplace for experienced infantry in the Department of the Gulf. I assume Halleck prioritized the main battlefield armies when it came to requests for cavalry and artillery, and this was the workaround. I’ve seen no official explanation for the 6th’s conversion. The men considered it a reward for meritorious service at Port Hudson, but that may have been wishful thinking. The soldiers knew it would mean a lot of garrison duty and considered it cause for celebration because, as Corden put it, “we shall have an easier time of it, and not near the exposure to all kinds of weather and hard marching and fighting we have had to endure as infantry.” Conversion from infantry did not guarantee that the Michiganders wouldn’t have their old rifles shoved back in their hands and be told to play infantryman now and again. “We have been artillery,” one officer joked, “then infantry [again], the engineer corps now, and next I think we will be the Invalid Corps or Corps d’Afrique.” In any event, the move to artillery signaled a virtual end to active operations for the 6th Michigan in July 1863, although they wouldn’t muster out until August 1865. This period was so uneventful that I summarized it in the final chapter, emphasizing the highlights (some of which are amusing—bored volunteers do the darnedest things). In the doldrums of camp life, discipline grew so lax that one late-war inspection report makes the regiment sound like something out of an episode of F Troop. It makes for hilarious reading now but probably not so much at the time. The unit almost mutinied four months after Appomattox, impatient from awaiting orders to return home.


CWBA: What’s next for you? Do you have more Michigan regimental studies in the pipeline?

EF: I am serving on the oversight committee for a lengthy documentary film about the 11th Michigan Infantry (the subject of my first two books). I haven’t settled on my next book topic yet, though I’ve been kicking some ideas around. It is likely I will author another regimental at some point—Michigan or not—and I have come across a letter collection or two I’d like to publish. I also hope at some point to research a lesser-known battle. There are always a hundred things I’d like to be doing, and never enough hours in a day. While pondering what’s next, I’ve been writing a novel of the Reconstruction period.


CWBA: Thanks again for your time, Eric. Our talk has made me look forward to reading your book even more. And readers, once again the title is The 6th Michigan Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War: A History and Roster.

Author Q&A: Laurence Freiheit on "Major General Joseph King Fenno Mansfield"

Today we are joined by Larry Freiheit to talk about his 2019 book Major General Joseph King Fenno Mansfield: A Soldier From Beginning to End. It is his second major Civil War study (both with Camp Pope Publishing), the first being Boots and Saddles: Cavalry During the Maryland Campaign of September 1862, which is now in its second edition. Freiheit's Mansfield biography is a massive and beautifully illustrated tome that exhaustively examines the general's life and military career, both of which tragically ended on September 17, 1862 at the Battle of Antietam. 

• CWBA: Hi, Larry. Clearly a great deal of lifeblood went into your 800-page biography of J.K.F. Mansfield. In addition to being a keen student of the Maryland Campaign and your shared Connecticut origins, what else inspired you to involve yourself so deeply in Mansfield’s life story?

LF: First, thank you for your “keen student” comment, I don’t deserve that. This sounds silly but when I first started looking at Mansfield in the late 1990’s I identified with him not only because I was about his age when he was mortally wounded and I had a full beard at the time but with his somewhat acerbic wit and Puritanical bent. After I wrote my Maryland Campaign cavalry book my research and contacts with the primary Mansfield expert in the U.S., Dr. Tom Clemens, provided an easy gateway to a book about one of my home state’s most famous generals. Tom provided extensive help with my draft due to his expertise concerning Mansfield and the Battle of Antietam as well as 19th century U.S. military history.

• CWBA: After graduation from West Point and appointment to the prestigious U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Mansfield spent nearly three decades all told as a military engineer. What major construction projects did he oversee during that part of his army career?

LF: His most famous project was his decades-long involvement with the construction of Ft. Pulaski east of Savannah, Georgia. I visited the fort four times over the space of 20 years and talked with and received critical help from a ranger there, Michael Weinstein. He gave me access to hundreds of pages of documents about Mansfield’s involvement at the fort most importantly from Rogers W. Young, a Park Service employee. Young wrote extensively about the construction of Fort Pulaski and his research and writing are the most comprehensive available documents about Ft. Pulaski. His unpublished manuscripts, which include details from U.S. Army Engineering Department records, were the sources for his book A Connecticut Yankee on the Georgia Coast: The Engineering Epic of Fort Pulaski, 1821-1861 (subtitled “Being The Story of the Trials and Triumphs of Lieutenant, later Captain, Joseph K.F. Mansfield, United States Corps of Engineers, in the building of Fort Pulaski, on Cockspur Island, Savannah River, Georgia”) dated 1938. Ranger Weinstein copied the book for my use, which saved me countless hours at the National Archives.

While he was chief engineer for the fort Mansfield was also involved in many other projects since the Engineering Department allowed him to be absent during the summer “sickly months”. Most recognizable to readers would be his involvement with the National Road and help with projects such as assisting in the construction of Fort Hamilton, New York, and in the construction of the defenses of Hampton Roads, Virginia. He was in charge of Savannah River Improvement, Sullivan's Island Breakwater, South Carolina, and repairs to St. Augustine Seawall, Florida as well as improvement of Brunswick Harbor, Georgia. He was for about one year principal assistant at Fort Monroe and one year principal assistant at Fort Calhoun at the Rip Raps. While at Old Point Comfort Mansfield was detached and made a reconnaissance of the Pasquotank River from the Canal in the Dismal Swamp to Elizabeth City in North Carolina, and surveyed the bars.


• CWBA: The Mexican-American War briefly interrupted his engineer work. What were the highlights of his service in that conflict?

LF: Mansfield served as Gen. Zachary Taylor’s chief engineer. His first important contribution to Taylor’s successes was the design and construction of what became Ft. Brown, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico. After it was completed, he helped defend it when the Mexican Army attacked. Mansfield, while not in command of the fort, actively participated in its defense by leaving the fort one night to level a trench previously dug by U.S. Troops and by cutting down brush from which enemy snipers had been firing. An infantry officer in the fort wrote that “He is without doubt the soul of this little place and he is almost ubiquitous. He is without doubt of more service here than all the other officers put together.” Mansfield received a brevet to major for his actions.

But Mansfield’s most famous exploit was at the Battle of Monterrey, during which he was seriously wounded. Under Taylor’s orders, he was to show infantry units a way into the city. Taylor’s attack on Monterrey, a well-fortified city, was later viewed by some critics as ill-advised and unnecessary. Mansfield was praised by Lieutenant Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana: “That Mansfield is one of the most noble specimens of gallantry and heroism and chivalry I have ever met with. He is unacquainted with a feeling of fear and is persevering to death. After he was wounded, he tied a handkerchief round his leg and led the murderous charge on the enemy's works where the First and Third Divisions suffered so severely.” Mansfield received another brevet to lieutenant colonel for his bravery here. His flesh wound confined him to his bed for almost a month.

At the Battle of Buena Vista Mansfield again performed well, helping Taylor win his final major battle against the Mexican Army, this time commanded by Gen. Santa Anna. Here, Taylor was even more greatly outnumbered than he was in his previous battles, but, unlike before, most of his troops here were volunteers not regulars. Mansfield’s help was noted by Lt. John Pope in a tribute to all of Mansfield’s Mexican-American War exploits:

“I first saw him in action at the storming of Monterrey….I was one of the junior officers under him. We led the advance of the column which attacked and carried some of the fortifications on the lower part of the city. Of course Mansfield was wounded, shot through the calf of the leg; but he had it bound up, and the next I saw of him he was stretched out in a partly-reclining position behind a piece of artillery of Webster's battery, within open sight of the enemy's entrenchments, not 200 yards distant, and from which A TERRIFIC FIRE FROM ARTILLERY and small-arms was being poured upon the spot until the dust and dirt were flying in every direction. The place was too hot even for the gunners, and this one gun was served in person by Lieut. J.L. Donaldson, the First Lieutenant of the battery, who seemed as careless of his life as Mansfield. The latter was unable to walk on his wounded leg but was lying in the midst of this tremendous fire, in which it seemed impossible to live, with his field-glass to his eye, directing Donaldson where to aim his gun. Absolutely he seemed as unconscious of danger or as indifferent to it as if he had been walking the streets of Washington. I saw him again in battle under somewhat different circumstances at Buena Vista. Although still on General Taylor's staff, he did not go back with the General that night to Saltillo, but remained on the field with General Wool to help him select positions and post the troops for the next day's work. When we rode up on the plateau in the midst of a lost battle, as I have described, one of the first men I saw was General Mansfield. He rode a gray horse, which made him very conspicuous, and was charging furiously back and forth across the field, trying to rally the broken columns, but without success. He was beside himself with shame and humiliation, and the tears poured down his face. He was not tranquilized until the effects from Bragg's and Sherman's batteries became apparent. Mansfield had a keen military eye and most excellent military judgment, but he never afterward had the opportunity to exhibit them until the civil war, and he was killed, as it was almost certain he would be, in the first battle in which he was engaged.”

Pope’s 1891 encomium is a fitting tribute to Mansfield’s combat experiences during both the Mexican-American War and the U.S. Civil War.


• CWBA: The nearly eight years Inspector General Mansfield spent conducting extensive inspection tours throughout the West are meticulously documented in your book. As a senior staff officer acting in this capacity, what impact did he have on the antebellum army?

LF: As one of the Army’s two inspector generals, his meticulous reviews of troops and posts mainly west of the Mississippi River focused on his main obsession that soldiers and the posts they manned were combat ready. He had no patience for Army regulations or policies which did not contribute to ensuring that men, equipment, animals, and facilities were prepared to perform the Army’s missions. His somewhat Puritanical bent also resulted in his repeated condemnations of alcohol abuse in many western posts. As a senior Army officer of over 30 years and a combat veteran, Col. Mansfield was keenly aware of what the Army had to do to prepare for the next war. Mansfield also paid attention to the care of enlisted men knowing that it was they who won or lost battles, so their quarters, food, medical care, and pay were among his priorities. His engineering background also allowed him to propose better locations for forts and champion better roads and even transcontinental railroads. In addition to the persistent alcohol problem at existed at almost every post he decried the lack of sufficient numbers of officers, especially at the company level, which affected soldier’s training and discipline. This lack of leadership at small western posts meant that troops were often not able to perform basic functions required of soldiers because officers were assigned to duties away from their companies. Those officers who remained had to perform extra duties to cover for missing comrades, so they could spend little time with their men. He also decried the general lack of marksmanship training, which the Army began to address some years later. In short, Mansfield simply wanted the Army to be ready to perform its duties ,and he was ready to criticize anyone or anything which prevented it from so doing.


• CWBA: Mansfield commanded the Department of Washington during the first three months of the war and was in charge of the Washington city defenses for much of the second half of 1861. Was he a serious candidate for a major field command? What was his reaction to McDowell’s appointment to lead the army that would clash with the Confederates at First Bull Run?

LF: General Winfield Scott wanted Mansfield to lead the army in northern Virginia that confronted the Confederates at First Bull Run. Against Scott’s wishes, Pres. Lincoln appointed Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell, who suffered from lack of cooperation from Mansfield and Scott in his efforts to form his army and move west to challenge the Confederates. Mansfield was angry that Lincoln chose his junior, McDowell, to command the Union Army of Northeastern Virginia instead of him. It is unfortunate that the old general’s disappointment may have led to his not being enthusiastic or punctilious about helping McDowell’s efforts in the summer of 1861 prior to the battle: “Regiments were slow in coming across the river to take their assigned places with the Army of Northeastern Virginia. Scott or Mansfield had to approve each such assignment, and they took their time about it. When McDowell went personally to Mansfield to ask for more men, and more speedily, Mansfield just shook his head and replied, ‘I have no transportation.’” Scott was not opposed to McDowell’s advancement as he was adjutant general on Scott’s staff during the Mexican-American War, but Scott wanted Mansfield to command the army in northern Virginia.


• CWBA: Did Mansfield have any powerful political patrons or military high command supporters to back his ambitions?

LF: Mansfield had only Sec. of the Navy Gideon Welles in Lincoln’s cabinet more or less on his side, likely along with the State of Connecticut’s Congressional representatives. Scott favored Mansfield also but Mansfield had apparently only had lukewarm support from Welles. Welles did not find Mansfield to be more aggressive or creative than fellow West Pointers, as he expressed in his diary on 17 August 1862:

“A difficulty has existed from the beginning in the military, and I may say general management of the War…. General Scott was for a defensive policy, and the same causes which influenced him in that matter, [reinforcement of Norfolk, Virginia, which Welles championed and Scott denied] and the line of policy which he marked out, have governed the educated officers of the Army and to a great extend shaped the war measures of the Government. ‘We must erect our batteries on the eminences in the vicinity of Washington,' said General Mansfield to me, ‘and establish our military lines; frontiers between the belligerents, as between the countries of Continental Europe, are requisite.’ They were necessary in order to adapt and reconcile the theory and instruction of West Point to the war that was being prosecuted. We should, however, by this process become rapidly two hostile nations…. Instead of halting on the borders, building entrenchments, and repelling indiscriminately and treating as Rebels—enemies—all, Union as well as disunion, men in the insurrectionary region, we should, I thought, penetrate their territory, nourish and protect the Union sentiment, and create and strengthen a national feeling counter to Secession.”

Welles and many others including Lincoln believed, unlike Scott, Mansfield, and other experienced Army officers, that the war would be short and could be won quickly by aggressive action rather than a more planned, considered method. Welles would quickly be proved wrong but his early lack of strong support for Mansfield allowed McDowell to command the Union army which lost at First Bull Run.

McDowell found very active support from Sec. of the Treasury Chase, who clearly favored fellow Ohioans for positions as generals in the Army. McDowell, as assistant Adjutant General of the Army, was an early favorite of his, perhaps helped by a plan he submitted to Chase describing a Union deployment toward Manassas Junction. With Chase’s support, McDowell was put in command of the new Department of Northeastern Virginia. McDowell also had the support of Gov. William Dennison of Ohio. At a cabinet meeting in May 1861, Chase ensured that McDowell received a brigadier general's star although Chase wanted him to be a major general. Outside of the cabinet meeting, Chase spoke to McDowell who was surprised and chagrined that he might be made a major general ahead of senior officers, but he acquiesced in accepting a single star. Scott had plans for Mansfield and McDowell, but McDowell did not cooperate. Scott wanted Mansfield to remain in charge at Washington but did not want McDowell to command in northern Virginia. Scott tried unsuccessfully to get McDowell to refuse the command of the new Department of Northeastern Virginia, but the War Department placed McDowell in command at Lincoln’s urging. Mansfield expressed his disappointment in a letter to his wife: “I don’t feel exactly right about the manner I have been used. I should have been given a separate command in the place others assigned. I shall not forget this soon. They have allowed politics to interfere with my matters, and deprive me of my just position.”


• CWBA: What was Mansfield doing between the end of his run commanding the Washington defenses and his assignment to lead the army’s Twelfth Corps in mid-September?

LF: Mansfield reported to Fort Monroe on 1 October 1861 and met with Maj. Gen. John E. Wool, who sent him to Hatteras Inlet to bring order out of chaos at Union outposts on the North Carolina coast. There, Mansfield took command at Hatteras Inlet as Col. Rush C. Hawkins, commanding the 9th N.Y. Infantry, was relieved. General Wool held Hawkins responsible for the debacle in which the Union steam tug Fanny was surrendered, and for the “Chicamacomico Races” a few days later. Mansfield returned to Fort Monroe on 14 October and was in command of Camp Hamilton near Fort Monroe from 13 October to 24 November 1861, when he turned over command to Col. Max Weber and was ordered to relieve Brigadier General John W. Phelps at Newport News 24 November 1861. On 3 March 1862, Mansfield’s command was designated the First Brigade, First Division, Department of Virginia. Dix sent Mansfield to Suffolk with three regiments on 13 June 1862. But the most noteworthy adventure Mansfield had while in command at Newport News was related to the remarkable naval battle of the Civil War, the U.S.S. Monitor versus the C.S.S. Virginia (U.S.S. Merrimack). While the battle between the two ironclads took place on 9 March, Mansfield’s involvement was primarily the day before when the Virginia attacked Union blockaders in Hampton Roads. Mansfield ordered Union shore batteries and infantry to fire at Rebel ships and sailors as they approached the helpless U.S.S. Congress which had run aground and surrendered. He was heavily criticized by Confederates for continuing to fire after the Union ships had run up the white flag. He reportedly replied that: "I know the damned ship has surrendered…but we haven't." The Merrimack responded by firing at Mansfield’s camp: “The large shot passed entirely through the post hospital and the headquarters' building of General Mansfield, tearing down the chimney of the latter, and nearly burying that venerable officer in the ruins. He was, fortunately, but little hurt, and soon emerged from the house white with plaster.” Mansfield continued to bombard his superiors with requests to be assigned to command a unit in an active theater but to no avail. Maj. Gen. McClellan recognized Mansfield’s abilities and asked Sec. of War Stanton to place Mansfield in command of a division to be stationed at Ft. Monroe, but that did not happen. Mansfield had little use for either Wool or McClellan. Mansfield participated along with Lincoln and some of his cabinet in the capture of Norfolk in early May 1862. Perhaps reminding Lincoln of his abilities, on 8 September 1862 Mansfield was ordered north to join McClellan’s army near Washington, DC.


• CWBA: Was Mansfield the administration’s first choice to command the newly-formed Twelfth Corps?

LF: I found nothing to show when or why Lincoln or Stanton decided to give Mansfield a command with McClellan. Perhaps the administration was running out of experienced generals who had not failed in command and were not McClellan sycophants. Lincoln was likely casting about for generals in the east who were not part of McClellan’s coterie, who had faithful and unblemished military service and were available. It was also very likely that Mansfield had come to Lincoln’s attention again when Lincoln was at Fort Monroe and Norfolk, and, of course, Lincoln knew Mansfield well when he was in command of Washington in 1861. Mansfield’s recent letters to generals and politicians ardently requesting combat service likely reminded Lincoln that Mansfield should be a general pushed forward as others fell away due to poor performance or for political reasons. And it may be that finally his entreaties to friends and acquaintances such as Welles, Chase, Thayer, Totten, etc., bore fruit. McClellan did not choose Mansfield to command the XII Corps but rather Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick. Sedgwick did not want the command and refused thereby allowing McClellan to place Mansfield in command of his smallest corps. There is no record why McClellan replaced his first selection with Mansfield. Possibly he learned from Washington that Mansfield was soon to arrive and receive a command so if Mansfield’s fellow Nutmegger, Sedgwick, did not wish to leave his division, McClellan was not going to force the issue--Mansfield would command his smallest corps. These Old Army men, all Mexican-American War veterans--McClellan, Mansfield and Sedgwick--were not going to squabble at this time when combat was imminent. McClellan was obviously too busy to spend much time on what he probably wound up seeing as a relatively minor matter.


• CWBA: Unfortunately, Mansfield’s tenure as corps commander was measured in mere days. Can we glean anything from that very brief period that might tell us anything about Mansfield’s leadership style and high command fitness?

LF: As noted by John Pope, “Mansfield had a keen military eye and most excellent military judgment, but he never afterward had the opportunity to exhibit them until the civil war, and he was killed, as it was almost certain he would be, in the first battle in which he was engaged.” Although Mansfield had always been a staff officer, in the Mexican-American War he was in close combat and able to observe field commanders in action. Additionally, being on Gen. Taylor’s staff and interacting with him and other top commanders, he knew what had to be done at all levels in Taylor’s army. His tours of installations in the West showed him what good commanders could do in difficult situations. In the Mexican-American War, he and other Regular Army officers saw firsthand the good and bad qualities of volunteers so Mansfield’s efforts at Antietam concentrated on ensuring that his mostly volunteer troops were under close command. However, leading from the front often led to the death and wounding of general and field grade officers, but that obviously did not deter them from so doing. Mansfield, as Pope wrote, was perhaps too willing to expose himself and maybe should have been more cautious since he commanded a corps (and it was important to lead it for more than a few hours in the most important battle of the Civil War). Also Mansfield was in command of his corps for only a few days so did not know the abilities of his commanders and the capabilities of his regiments, so in leading them into battle he was perhaps overly cautious. Had he lived I believe that he would have been one of Lincoln’s better generals—aggressive but not overly so and willing to obey orders. His other potential weakness was his fondness for his enlisted men, but there is nothing in his record to show that he would not send them into battle because many would be killed or wounded. As an Old Army soldier his foremost desire was to accomplish his assigned mission.


• CWBA: In your opinion, has the battle’s traditional historical narrative gotten anything significantly wrong about how the general conducted himself at Antietam?

LF: Most historians spend little time on Mansfield at Antietam, justifiably so as he was wounded early in the battle and his influence was minimal. Since he was only in command of his corps for a few days he had little impact on its battle worthiness. Historians focus on Brig. Gen. Alpheus Williams’s comments about that morning; he described Mansfield as “an excellent gentleman, but a most fussy, obstinate officer.” Mansfield rode ahead to assess the situation and while he was gone, Williams saw that his division’s regiments were not deployed into line to meet the close-by enemy. Williams ordered his leading brigade, Crawford’s, to deploy, but Mansfield, upon returning, disagreed. The new corps commander was adamant about marching his troops to Hooker’s aid in formation of columns to maintain better control of his inexperienced troops, however, Williams did not agree: “I had five new regiments without drill or discipline. General Mansfield was greatly excited. Though an officer of acknowledged gallantry, he had a very nervous temperament and a very impatient manner. Feeling that our heavy masses of raw troops were sadly exposed, I begged him to let me deploy them in line of battle, in which the men present but two ranks or rows instead of twenty, as we were marching, but I could not move him. He was positive that all the new regiments would run away.” Mansfield’s experience with green volunteers clearly affected his view of how he should employ his regiments. Williams knew more about these regiments as he was in temporary command until Mansfield was assigned, so perhaps he might have trusted Williams’s judgement more. It is clear, however, based upon his combat experience and best judgement, that he proceeded as he thought best and his lack of fear of being in the line of fire sealed his fate. Historian Bruce Catton wrote a fitting summary for the old general’s efforts that day: “He had had the corps only two days, but he had already made the soldiers like and respect him; it seems likely that he might have made quite a name if he had been spared.”


• CWBA: Are there any lingering questions about his mortal wounding that your book attempts to answer?

LF: The controversies after the battle and after the end of the war revolved around who shot Mansfield and where Mansfield was when he was shot. John Mead Gould was the 10th Maine’s regiment’s historian and a participant at Antietam as a first lieutenant in Co. E, and the Adjutant of 10th Maine. He became an authority for the 10th Maine’s activities and collaborated with Antietam expert Ezra Carman for details of actions on that part of the field especially concerning Mansfield. Gould first recorded in his diary the circumstances of Mansfield’s wounding and later spent much time and effort to ensure that his recollection prevailed over all the others, especially the 125th Pennsylvania. Gould, having convinced Carman and most other veterans that Mansfield was wounded in front of the 10th Maine, determined after corresponding with Confederate veterans that the 21st Georgia were the ones most likely to have shot Mansfield although he admitted that units of the 5th Texas and 4th Alabama were mixed in. Today most historians agree with Gould and Carmen that Mansfield was near the 10th Maine when he was shot despite the believable claims of the 125th Pennsylvania location advocates. I have to agree with Gould and Carmen as they have the weight of the evidence. Dr. Tom Clemens believes that the Pennsylvanians witnessed another officer shot who resembled Mansfield thereby engendering the controversy.


• CWBA: Finally, how would you summarize Mansfield’s Civil War legacy?

LF: Mansfield spent his entire life from age 13 in the U.S. Army, entering West Point at that age. He was a true soldier of the Old Army. His contribution to the Union Civil War effort was small but in every action or activity he did well, except arguably his last day on 17 September 1862 at Antietam. Perhaps his inspection of military posts as an Inspector General influenced the pre-war Army to have more company level officers available with their troops and ensure that enlisted men were adequately cared for and trained by their officers. So his Civil War influence started years before the war began. During the war his troops universally admired him, often commenting on his willingness to look after their well-being. He did well in command of Washington helping take parts of northern Virginia from the Confederates. His efforts during the Monitor-Merrimack battle showed that he was willing to bend rules to help his comrades in the Navy. He was a driven officer who did not suffer fools gladly. As he did not survive Antietam, his future as a Civil War commander is only speculative, but I believe that he would have been one of Lincoln’s best generals.