GOING TO SEE THE ELEPHANT: A Civil War Memoir

By Danelle Hall and William D. Hall

This book tells of two journeys by two members of the same family, through the landscape of the Civil War, one during the heart of the war, and the second, one hundred fifty years later.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781617922015

Book preview

Going to see the Elephant

A Civil War Memoir

By

William D. Hall

And

Danelle Hall

Research by

Dale Hall

COVER PHOTO: Elephas Maximus Eye Closeup (c) by Alexander Klink, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AlexanderKlink, CC-BY

Elephants are unusual today. In William D. Hall’s day they were such rare and exotic creatures that country lads would trudge miles to see one.

Seeing the elephant came to mean experiencing any strange and possibly frightening event. It was a phrase used with positive connotations during the 1849 gold rush and later with much darker meaning in the Civil War. Veteran regiments, returning from one of the horrific ‘tree shattering’ battles to rest and regroup, would tell new recruits that they had ‘been to see the elephant.’"

TREASURES OF THE SMITHSONIAN, page 23

Copyright 2011 by Danelle Hall

 DLH Publishing

ISBN: 9781617922015

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Going to See the Elephant

Take the Cars . . . to Nashville

Started to the Front Alabama and Georgia

Took charge of a herd of cattle

Have our First Fight Atlanta and Jonesboro"

Started After old Hood

All in a Blaze of Fire, the March to the Sea

Savannah

Orders to Move, South Carolina

March into North Carolina

Move early, cross into Virginia

Visit Washington City

Mustered Out and Started Home

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Sources

Wm. D. Hall’s Journal

Introduction

In 2012, it will be one hundred fifty years since W. D. Hall kissed his wife, Mary, and two daughters, pocketed his small brown diary (above) and headed for Macon, Missouri, for whatever basic training Civil War soldiers received. The American Civil War was into its second year when he left home. His two brothers had already gone. His father, some siblings, his wife of four years and his two small daughters remained behind to fight their own war of survival.

 From the time he left his home near Cainesville, Missouri in August of 1862 until he marched with Sherman’s troops through Georgia and the Carolinas and took part in the Review of Troops in Washington, D. C. at the end of the conflict, W. D. recorded his war. The contents of that tattered book guided our Tundra along the blue highways of W. D.’s journey with the lyrics of the Paul Simon song, Graceland a haunting musical theme to our travels, . . .we’re following the river . . . to the cradle of the Civil War,  . . . going to Graceland.

My husband Dale is W. D.’s great grandson.

We learned of the existence of W. D.’s Civil War journal from a chance comment at a family reunion, something along the lines of Yes, I think there was a journal. I don’t know where it is, though.

Fortunately, Dale’s brother, Eldon, is the encyclopedia of Hall family history and tracked it down for us. A few weeks later we had a photocopy of it. A few weeks after that my husband went on a six week camping trip to Alaska with a friend and his two boys, leaving me with time on my hands after work. I spent that time deciphering and transcribing W. D.’s spidery handwriting and getting my first up close and personal glimpse of the holocaust that shredded our country and still reverberates to this day.

At some point between discovering the journal in the mid-nineties and our retirement, the idea of following W. D.’s journey from Missouri to Washington, D. C. by way of Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia sprouted.  Two years ago Dale and I looked at each other and said, This is the year.

We’ve found no photos of William D. Hall. Most of the Hall men of today are tall, so I imagine he was tall. What the D stood for in his name no one knows. Any written traces spoke of W. D. Hall or William D. Hall. Because there’s no other proof and since Dale’s family reuses names, I’m guessing that his name was William Dale Hall.

William’s journal of his travels through the landscape of the Civil War is more a list of towns and cities and rivers that he passed than it is a description of the war and its impact on him. The Hall men of today tend to take care of business without fanfare or discussion. I have to think that William D. was like that also, putting one foot in front of the other, doing what needed to be done, recording the day-to-day movements of his unit. In the lists that our son and two grandsons make, in the relentless discipline of my husband and my son and daughter are fragments of this shadowy ancestor. Who was he? What did he think and feel? In following his trek to see the elephant, I think we were . . . searching for the boy from long ago, to borrow a phrase from Jamie O’Hara’s Vietnam era song, 50,000 Names.

Although W. D.’s entries were normally brief, he left enough detail that we were able to follow his path. Some events he encountered were too much to pass over without comment—like the unburied bodies at the Chickamauga battlefield or Atlanta in flames.

Family legend had W. D. serving in the Confederate army as a chaplain. We’re not sure where that story came from. Actual research revealed that W. D. was a Union supply soldier and a forager or bummer. He herded cattle. He built earthworks and tore up railroad lines. He skirmished several times, came close to dying on a mountain near Pilot Knob, Missouri during a raid by the Confederate General John Marmaduke and his soldiers. He fought near the banks of the Flint River in the savage two-day Jonesboro, Georgia battle that resulted in the fall of Atlanta. He was with Slocum’s troops in the Fourteenth Corps, when Sherman swept in a terrible fifty-mile wide line of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah. Sixty eight of W. D.’s fellow foragers were killed during that campaign.

He was also with Sherman during the final days of the war when Sherman’s army harried the Confederate forces up through the Carolinas and Virginia. While his unit was stranded by a flooding river near Great Falls, South Carolina, he was almost captured by Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry. Plaques at the site of the Battle of Bentonville, North Carolina show where W. D.’s unit fought in this last major battle of the Civil War.

After the war was over, he and his outfit marched through Virginia to Washington, D. C. and participated in the two day Review of Troops. Grant’s army under the command of General Meade marched the first day. Sherman’s troops including W. D. marched the second, crossing Long’s Bridge, then up Maryland Avenue past the Capitol, and the White House and continuing through Georgetown. A few days later, he rode the rails and the riverboats home.

The war took a severe toll on his health. Based on other family papers, we know that he may have been in the early stages of tuberculosis when he enlisted. At the very beginning of his service, he spent time in the Macon, Missouri Union infirmary and had a brief furlough home shortly after he reported for training. His comments on his health throughout the journal indicate that it was a matter that he monitored closely. He was never strong after the war and died in 1880. He would have been only forty-two.

New and better roads have shifted the latitude and longitude of landmarks in the years since those terrible times. Dams have captured sluggish rivers and turned them into lakes. In the process, whole communities have vanished. In Macon, Missouri, the training field has gone to grass. Only word of mouth tells where the field was. Almost lost is the fact that Confederate forces trained just across the railroad track from the Union forces, something that must have led to early confrontations. Cities have grown from small gatherings of a few thousand people into metropolitan areas with millions. Time and humans spreading ever outward have created a twenty-first century digital that overlays the nineteenth century daguerreotype.

 We were pleasantly surprised, however, at how many of the landmarks that William D. mentioned in his journal were still there.

Courthouses, historic markers and road signs provided most of the photo opportunities for documenting our odyssey. Time has obliterated many of the other relics; buildings have been torn down, or remodeled into something more modern. One site of a major battle, Resaca, Georgia, is a tiny town that has dwindled to a small convenience store and a scattering of other buildings. One plaque and a poorly marked Confederate cemetery are the only reminders of that battle. Fortunately, a movement is underway to build a memorial park.

We followed W. D.’s journey to see the elephant from Cainesville, Missouri where he enlisted through Georgia and the Carolinas where he marched and fought with Sherman to the parade route in Washington, D. C. and Fort Bunker Hill where he was discharged. We followed his route home along the Ohio River and dreamed of railroads and riverboats and a weary soldier on his way to Missouri.

 Here are both of our stories.

Going to see the elephant . . .

Journal Cover:

W. D. Hall, his Book.  Diary of travels in service presented by a friend and valued highly.  All persons will please forebear cribbing over this book:  W. D. Hall

Journal Page 1

W. D. Hall.  23rd Mo.: containing a list of moves and travels during the rebellion in the United States; in which the above named was one who participated in its repression. 

This book is valued very highly as it contains valuable notes and is also a present by a Friend.

Journal Page 2

Travels of William D. Hall of Co 23rd Missouri Volunteers comencing Aug 25th, 1862.  Enlisted in U. S. Service Aug 25/62, left home Aug 28th 62.

William D.’s journey and our journey both began in the northwest corner of Missouri where W. D. and his father and some siblings had moved from Indiana just a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War. They settled on a small hardscrabble farm on land that swoops up and down like a roller coaster. Wild irises bloomed along the roadside in several places outside of Blythedale. The land where the Halls lived was green and lush, but even so, the country was too rocky and rough for anything other than subsistence farming or cattle.

While the Halls settled into their new Missouri home, while W. D. met, courted and married Mary Thompson, the United States was poised on the brink of disintegration.

Lincoln was elected to the Presidency in 1860. In January 1861, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and like dominos tumbling, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed.

Lincoln responded by declaring a state of insurrection and calling for 75,000 volunteers to enlist for three months of service--a wildly optimistic assessment of the situation. Just days after Lincoln’s move, the Union crumbled even more as Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Caroline seceded.

Missouri could have gone either way. There were forces in the state’s government that pushed for joining the Confederate States of America. Only military intervention thwarted an attempt to take over the Missouri arsenal for the south and thus commit Missouri to the southern cause. As the southern uprising settled into a full scale war, and the south won a victory at Manassas and forced a Union retreat at Richmond, Lincoln sent out a call for an additional 300,000 men. Given the timing, it is likely that William D. responded to this call to arms.

Glaze Cemetery sits just south of a narrow road, Road N, that goes east from Blythedale, Missouri in Harrison County and joins the road to Cainesville.

An ancient tree sits to the northeast of W. D.’s grave.  His father, William, and Zachariah, possibly a brother, are buried close by. Weather, time and some kind of black fungus have all but obliterated any readable markings or inscriptions. Dale had to do a rubbing of the stone to decipher that W. D. was born on November 5, 1837, and died June, 28, 1880.

In Bethany, Missouri in the first of many motel rooms on our journey, we confronted the reality of the project we’d undertaken. The Civil War was a vast four-year conglomeration of generals, soldiers, battles, stupid mistakes and surprising cleverness. We planned to follow one man through this complicated landscape. Our knowledge of the Civil War was limited to half remembered school units, movies like Gone with the Wind and the Ken Burns documentary about the war. We knew where W. D. traveled. However, our thinking hadn’t gone much beyond that.

Once we were actually in Missouri and looking at maps, we realized that we would have to have additional information if our trip was to be more than a drive through the southern states. We had W. D.’s journal that told us our moves from one locale to another, but we needed to understand the reason for the moves. We needed a list of the players.

Dale went first to the Post Office in Bethany, a brick and granite block building in the Art Deco style with a brick facade, circa 1939, and emerged with a map of Harrison County that was the size of a dining room table. Although we only used the map a couple of times, it marked our recognition that we needed more information than what was contained in W. D.’s journal.

Armed with a guide to the roads of the county, our next stop was the Harrison County Genealogy Society Library where three women, Linda and two others, helped us track down the elusive Wm. D. Hall. One set of books that the women were especially proud of, BURIAL RECORDS OF HARRISON COUNTY, a two volume set of the inhabitants of each cemetery in the county, contained the information the researchers could glean from the tombstones. William D.’s record was listed under William O, which was distressing but understandable given the condition of his marker.

There is something about genealogical research that sucks you in, and enmeshes you in more information than you want or need. In Bethany, we received a lesson in the difference between genealogical research and historical research, between tracing families and tracing troop movements.

As a novelist, I wanted to get some sense of the man, W. D. and what he might have seen and felt as he went through the war. His journal entries were brief and concise. No emotions were recorded. I hoped the landscape of his travels and the historical context of his entries would reflect the man. Dale was interested in the events noted in the journal because his great grandfather experienced them. We knew already that his wife, Mary, took her brood of children including Dale’s grandfather, Edward, and left the area after W. D. died, going first of all to Kansas, and then making the run into Oklahoma. But we weren’t researching Mary Hall and her son. We were following the adventures of W. D. Hall.

We spent a good part of the morning extricating ourselves from the search