A Journal of the American Civil War: V6-3: Gettysburg: Regimental Leadership and Command

By Theodore P. Savas

Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes.

35th Battalion VA Cavalry – Reed and Bigelow’s Battery –1st WV Cavalry – Twice lost 8th LA battle flag – Major Nevin and the 93rd PA Infantry – Reunion in 1887 of Philadelphia Brigade and Pickett’s Division

• Language: English
• Publisher: Savas Publishing
• Release date: Dec 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954547377

Book preview

Introduction

Carol Reardon

Long after Appomattox, a Pennsylvania veteran who had served in the ranks of the Philadelphia Brigade at Gettysburg griped that generals and admirals win high renown for the military achievements of their men, but personal deeds of heroism by simple privates and subalterns are rarely recorded. ¹ He feared his story and those of his comrades would be lost to history.

He had reason to fear such a fate. In the survivors’ eyes at least, Gettysburg had been a soldier’s battle, one in which the enlisted man’s tenacity mattered as much as the command performance of any general. Such men, regardless of class or station in civilian life, believed that they deserved to be remembered with respect for their sacrifices to their respective causes. Even twenty years after the fact, a Virginian in Pickett’s Division recalled that while nearly every family of honorable mention in the history of the State as a Colony or Common-wealth, had its representative in his 18th Virginia Infantry, and they had served with equal distinction as officers and as privates, he gloried in acknowledging that both his proud Cavaliers and his Old Dominion yeomanry, the bone and sinew of the land, had sprung from a warlike ancestry.² One need not search far to find similar tributes to soldiers in blue, but for years, historians did not feature them prominently in a plethora of traditional campaign studies.

The spirits of the private soldiers of the Civil War may rest easier now. The historical record no longer ignores them or their sacrifices. But the combatants of the 1860s had to wait nearly a century, until the era of the Civil War centennial of the 1960s, to be rediscovered as a rich source of information and insights about this crucial era in American history.

The common soldier of the Civil War has moved to central stage over the past several decades chiefly because historians began to ask new questions about the great sectional conflict. As social historians began to study history from the bottom up through the lenses of class, race, and gender, they infused new intellectual energy into examinations of all social and political institutions, including armies and the wars they fought. Civil War scholars learned from them and became talented practitioners of a new military history that placed less stress on grand campaigns or great generals and humanized the faceless blocks that represented regiments and brigades on so many battle maps.

In their efforts to learn more about the common soldier, scholars have found a treasure trove of wonderfully insightful research materials to inform their studies. Thousands of Civil War soldiers of all ranks, North and South alike, kept diaries and wrote home. Even now, the letters of such men as the 9th Massachusetts Battery’s Bugler Charles W. Reed add materially to our understanding of a citizen-soldier’s life in uniform. Other soldiers sustained a correspondence with local newspaper editors, and Civil War scholars still mine wartime dailies for firsthand accounts of army life in camp, on the march, and in battle. Still other soldiers took time in their postwar years to publish personal or professional memoirs of their service, or they left behind the raw materials that contribute so importantly to such modern regimental histories as those of the 1st West Virginia Cavalry and the 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry that appear in this volume. Indeed, the soldiers had told us their stories, but only in the last few decades have we begun to learn how to preserve them.

A few scholars, most notably Bell Irvin Wiley, showed historians how to use all these wonderful sources to write about the privates, sergeants, and captains who followed the orders of the generals. Even today, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (1952) still possess scholarly merit and provide a useful starting point for anyone who seeks to understand the daily life of the Civil War’s common soldier. In Soldiers Blue and Gray (1988), James I. Robertson’s description of their day-to-day life compels readers to respect even more the ability of the Civil War’s citizens-in-arms to meet and overcome the challenges of military service.

But historians have begun to dig even deeper into questions beyond the many elements that comprised the common soldier’s daily experience. One particularly fruitful avenue of approach considers investigations of soldier motivation.

Many of the new questions concern the significant step of entering military service. What made a civilian give up the safety of home and hearth for possible death on the battlefield or in the prison pen? Did Union soldiers find that A sense of purpose, a clear belief in the value of their cause, and a strident faith in their own ability to sustain their effort, as Earl J. Hess argued in Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (1988)?³ Such questions raise still more concerns. For instance, did the enlistees of 1862 (such as those of the 9th Massachusetts Battery) who joined up after the first blush of martial enthusiasm waned, differ in any fundamental way from those the volunteers of the spring of 1861?

Students of the Civil War armies increasingly learn to ask another fundamental question: who fought this war? Was it, as was often said, a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight? A few pilot studies, relying on census records and sophisticated statistical analytical tools, suggest otherwise. After a detailed study of Union enlistees from Concord, Massachusetts, W. J. Rorabaugh discovered that, in general, a greater proportion of propertyless men enlisted than did propertied men. This would seem, on first glance, to sustain the accepted notions. Upon further investigation, however, he also discovered some elements of the propertied classes, especially small shopkeepers, clerks, and skilled workers still in their twenties enlisted in far greater proportions than most other occupational classes he examined.⁴ Edward J. Hagerty’s recent volume on the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry, Collis’ Zouaves (1997), reinforces the notion that the North’s Civil War indeed did become a people’s war, with all classes and all interests willing to back up their commitment by serving in uniforms.⁵

Other modern students of Civil War armies have asked questions about the soldiers’ ability and willingness to endure through hardship and sustain loyalty to his cause. James M. McPherson, author of For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), found himself wondering about just that question as he took some of his Princeton University students across the field of Pickett’s Charge. What made these men do it? he asked himself, and then continued to query, What motivated them to advance into that wall of fire? What caused them to go forward despite the high odds against coming out safely?⁶ The soldiers of the 1st West Virginia Cavalry and the 93rd Pennsylvania and 8th Louisiana infantry regiments who fought at Gettysburg were veterans of camp and battlefield. They had seen death at close range and in indescribably horrible ways in combat, watched friends slip away from dysentery or typhoid in camp, noticed with a mixture of outrage and understanding when broken spirited comrades deserted. What made some stay in the ranks while others sought to leave the army any way they could to find relief from the physical, mental, and spiritual anguish of war? Did the strength of their belief in their cause force many to stay while others left?

Historians have offered a variety of answers. In Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences (1988) and The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (1993), Reid Mitchell examined the strong bonds of community-based kinship that bound cause and comrades together in regiments where brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins might serve alongside school chums, business associates, and congregants from their local church. In Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (1987), Gerald Linderman considered the soldiers’ bond to each other the most critical element in an individual soldier’s decision to stay and fight it out; feeling increasingly alienated from civilians at home who never could understand what they had seen or experienced, they found courage in the obligation they owed their comrades and used it to steel themselves for battle until the end of the war.

Some of the most interesting scholarship today examines the motivations and inspirations that help a soldier cope with the stresses of combat and the near possibility of death. What compelled a soldier to go forward with his comrades into battle, when self-preservation dictated an opposite course? Ever since the popular success of John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) that examined combat at Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, students of the Civil War have tried to describe an American face of battle for the 1860s. At its foundation, combat is a group activity experienced individually. Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves examine the reactions of soldiers to their first taste of battle in Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (1989). Moreover as Earl J. Hess notes in The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (1997), as a private or a sergeant or even a general marched into battle, he began the process of defining his role in war, or discovering the makeup of his own character.⁷ Civil War soldiers accepted a distinction between moral courage and physical courage. The cavalrymen, artillerymen, and infantrymen whose experiences are preserved on these pages understood that at some point a generally good man might give into his fear and leave a battlefield. But if he had sufficient moral courage, the kind produced after long reflection about the whys that made him enlist and stay the course for so long, he ultimately could find the kind of sustaining strength that might keep him from running away from the next Peach Orchard or Pickett’s Charge.

Historians also have begun to understand that the legacy of war extends well into peacetime. Civil War soldiers were proud of their contributions to their respective causes, victorious or not, and they commemorated their public service in many ways. They wrote unit histories and erected monuments in town squares, North and South. They dedicated monuments on their greatest battlefields. Scott Hartwig’s examination in this volume of one of the first Gettysburg reunions in 1887 reveals the highly charged emotional nature of these meetings between old warriors. Veterans recalled their actions on many battlefields of the Civil War, but Gettysburg in particular summoned them forth in great numbers, drawn to the site of what they acknowledge, rightly or not, as the high water mark of the Rebellion.

These and more issues have drawn the attention of a host of outstanding Civil War scholars and suggest fruitful directions for additional research. Essays such as those contained in this volume help all students of the Civil War era understand more about the courage of those who answered the call of their country and their conscience in the 1860s.

Notes

1. Albert Lawson, War Anecdotes and Incidents of Army Life (Cincinnati, 1888), p. 125-26.

2. Henry T. Owen, Pickett at Gettysburg, Philadelphia Weekly Times, March 26, 1881.

3. Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Profess: Northerners and Their War for the Union (New York, 1988), p. 2.

4. W. J. Rorabaugh, Who Fought For the North in the Civil War? Concord, Massachusetts, Enlistments, Journal of American History, vol. 73 (December 1986), p. 697.

5. Edward J. Hagerty, Collis’ Zouaves: The 114th Pennsylvania Infantry in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1997).

6. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997), p. 3.

7. Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence, Kansas, 1997), p. 74.

…we were attacked by White’s battalion; we were overpowered and whipped.

COMANCHES ON THE WARPATH

The 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry in the Gettysburg Campaign

John M. Chapman

The men of the 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry could take great pride in their service during the Gettysburg Campaign. From the opening shots of the campaign at Brandy Station until Lee’s army retreated across the Potomac into Virginia over a month later, these hard-riding troopers under the command of Lt. Col. Elijah V. White solidified their ever-growing reputation as an elite fighting unit. Whether functioning independently or serving with the regular cavalry, White’s men were at the forefront of much of the campaign. Indeed, for the last week of June 1863, this small battalion was the only cavalry that much of the Army of Northern Virginia had contact while in Pennsylvania.

The 35th Virginia, known later in the war as The Comanches, was the creation of Elijah Viers White. Lige White, a Marylander by birth, had resided across the Potomac River in Loudoun County, Virginia, since 1857. When war commenced in 1861, he transferred from Capt. Thomas J. Shreve’s company of Loudoun Cavalry to Turner Ashby’s 7th Virginia Cavalry Regiment. While home on leave in October 1861, White used his intimate knowledge of the surrounding Potomac River region to assist the local Confederate unit in routing a Union force at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia. Utilizing this new-found notoriety to his advantage, White set out to form his own command.¹

After being rejected for a captain’s commission in the regular army, White received an appointment as a captain in the Provisional Army, and was granted permission to raise a cavalry company for independent service on the border. By March 1862 he had recruited enough men from Loudoun County and its environs to form White’s Rebels, an independent scout company. Assigned to Gen. Richard Ewell’s Division of Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Department, this small band of troopers saw hard service scouting and functioning as couriers throughout the major campaigns of that spring and summer. At the start of the Maryland Campaign in September 1862, White’s Rebels had returned to operating as an independent command, largely in the Loudoun County area, an arrangement which no doubt suited the unit.²

Finally, having mounted enough men to claim battalion status, in October the unit was mustered into the army as White’s Battalion Virginia Cavalry, composed of five complete companies, with Major Lige White commanding. By February 4, 1863, the unit was up to full battalion strength, and was officially designated the 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, with White as its lieutenant colonel. By the end of the war more than 800 men had signed up with White’s battalion. However, few muster rolls found more than 300 men present at any given time.³

The battalion was comprised of men who enlisted from Rockville, Maryland, south to Charlottesville, Virginia, and points between. Companies A, C, and D hailed mainly from Loudoun County, with Company A being formed from the original members of White’s Rebels. Company B was comprised of men from Montgomery and Frederick counties, Maryland and led by Capt. George W. Chiswell from Poolesville, Maryland. Chiswell’s Maryland Exiles had joined up with White’s Rebels the previous summer. Company E was recruited up the Shenandoah Valley in Page and Shenandoah counties, while Company F consisted of men from Albemarle and Greene counties in Virginia.⁴

Most of the men who signed up with White’s Company, and subsequently White’s Battalion, did so because of their desire to serve in an independent command. In addition to the understandable appeal of avoiding the regimen of regular military service, those who signed up with White liked the idea of campaigning independently in close proximity to family lands and loved ones. Much to their chagrin, as the war progressed they were called with increasing frequency to serve as a regular cavalry unit. Although White’s men performed their duties well when assigned to the regular cavalry, they were at their best when operating as an independent command on the backroads where they grew up—raiding, harassing, and destroying. When they were taken away from independent border service, near mutiny ensued on more than one occasion.⁵

By the start of the Gettysburg Campaign, White and his small band of troopers had established a reputation as a cavalry unit which excelled as a raiding force. Since their formation into a battalion had occurred, they had participated in several successful expeditions which brought them praise from no lesser figures then Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart. The latter general, despite a disagreement with White the previous fall—one that directly resulted in White’s Rebels independent status during that time—commended the battalion on numerous occasions. ‘White has thus given early evidence of the essential characteristic of a successful cavalry leader—prudent boldness," wrote Stuart in January 1863.⁶

From early 1863 on, the 35th Virginia was attached to Brig. Gen. William E. Grumble Jones’ Brigade of regular cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley. After dissent in the ranks concerning their new status was quelled, the battalion spent the next several months in camp, with the troopers concentrating on drill while White and his officers focused on organization and logistics. Jones, an irreverent West Pointer viewed as one of the best outpost officers in the Army of Northern Virginia, drilled his brigade incessantly, causing many of the independent-minded 35th Virginia troopers to resent their new status more than ever. As Frank Myer of Company A recalled, White’s men didn’t like to drill, and they had small opinion of the sabre as a weapon to fight Yankees with, no matter how sharp it might be, and the regular Saturday grindings were looked upon as perfect nuisances.⁷

Aversion to drill and sabres aside, by late spring of 1863 the 35th Virginia began to look like the efficient, disciplined cavalry unit that Grumble Jones insisted on commanding. The battalion, together with the 6th, 7th, 11th, and 12th Virginia Cavalry regiments and Chew’s Battery, constituted Jones’ Valley Brigade. Recruited almost entirely from the Shenandoah Valley and neighboring counties, the brigade was blessed with excellent horsemen who knew the region well. By the end of the war they would be known as the Laurel Brigade, and would possess a record and reputation rivaled by few other cavalry brigades on either side.⁸

In late April 1863, the 35th Virginia embarked on its first major expedition under Jones’ leadership, a bold month-long raid through the mountains of western Virginia designed to disrupt transportation on the vital Baltimore and Ohio railroad and secure badly needed livestock for Lee’s army. By the time the raid was over, the battalion had ridden over 700 miles, played a leading role in a severe but ultimately successful skirmish, and returned with a significant amount of captured material and men. During the skirmish, which took place on April 25 at Greenland Gap in Hardy County, (West) Virginia, the battalion dismounted and assaulted a fortified church, losing one killed and eight wounded in the process. According to Jones, White’s men did the work assigned to them in the most handsome manner. In his own report, White paid notice to the gallant conduct of Private Thomas Tippett, of Company A, who, under a galling fire, ascended the chimney and set fire to the roof of the church. Though the overall impact of the raid on the Northern military was minimal, it was a success nonetheless, resulting in a large quantity of seized livestock for Lee’s army as well as hundreds of captured Federals, all at the cost of a handful of Confederate casualties.⁹

Thirty-one days after the raid into western Virginia commenced, the brigade returned to its camp near Mt. Crawford and a well-earned rest. This respite was to last only a little over a week, for on June 1 the brigade broke camp and began to move east over the Blue Ridge Mountains to link up with Stuart’s Cavalry Division, camped near Culpeper, Virginia. Lee was ready to begin his second invasion of the North, and he needed all the cavalry Stuart could muster to mask his intentions from the Union army.¹⁰ By June 4, the 35th Virginia and the rest of the brigade had crossed the Blue Ridge and arrived at Stuart’s main cavalry camp, situated just outside the tiny railroad depot of Brandy Station, only a few miles north of Culpeper, Virginia. Much to their disappointment, they found out upon their arrival that they and the rest of the brigade were to ride in a grand review of the cavalry to be staged the next day a few miles from camp. For a group of men who had had all too little rest since their 700-mile raid, this was just the sort of spectacle and pageantry they could do without. Still, by all accounts, the brigade presented itself well. The brigade’s ordnance officer, Capt. W. N. McDonald, noticed that "General Jones rode at their head, evidently proud of his command, but with disdainful air, for he hated the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of war."¹¹

The following day the brigade, glad to put the review behind them, made camp near St. James Church, about two miles south of Beverly’s Ford on the Rappahannock River. When the men found that another review was scheduled for June 8—this time with General Lee present—their irritation turned to anger. Grumble Jones showed his displeasure by being slow to bring up his brigade during the review, a move duly noted by Stuart and his staff. Lige White felt that such reviews did nothing but succeed in tiring men and horses and allow the enemy to count our numbers, words which would be proven true in less than a day’s time.¹²

Lieutenant Colonel Elijah V. White (seated, with hand on saber) with unidentified officers and ladies at Brandy Station, Virginia.

USAMHI

The next morning, June 9, the bulk of the Confederate cavalry was to be put in motion to serve as a screen for Lee’s move north towards Pennsylvania. Confederate infantry under corps commanders James Longstreet and Richard Ewell were already gathered around Culpeper and ready to march. Jones’ Brigade had been issued orders the night before, and as dawn approached most of the troopers remained asleep. Unbeknownst to them, a force of about 5,500 well-mounted Federals under the command of Brig. Gen. John Buford was preparing to splash across Beverly’s Ford and move towards Culpeper. This force, a part of Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton’s command, was half of a two-pronged Union thrust towards Culpeper aimed at ascertaining the intentions of Lee’s army. Unaware that Confederate cavalry was in the area to screen Lee’s infantry, and believing that Stuart’s force was camped closer to Culpeper almost ten miles to the southwest, the Federal cavalrymen had no idea they were about to confront the main body of Confederate horsemen.¹³

Across the Rappahannock, Stuart’s cavalry slumbered peacefully, anticipating only a hard day of riding ahead of them, not a major battle. As they had been since June 5, the 35th Virginia was camped with the bulk of Jones’ brigade in the vicinity of St. James Church, several hundred yards west of the Beverly’s Ford road. On the road itself was the camp of the 6th Virginia. Extending several hundred yards north from the 6th Virginia’s bivouac, on either side of the road, was an open field which ended at a large expanse of woods traversing both sides of the road. At the edge of these woods, in front of but within view of the 6th Virginia’s camp, was the bivouac site for four batteries of Stuart’s tight artillery. Some two miles north, Company A of the 6th Virginia picketed Beverly’s Ford itself.¹⁴

Around 4:30 a.m., the lead brigade of Federal horsemen under Col. Benjamin F. Grimes Davis began crossing at the ford. Pushing back the pickets of the 6th Virginia, the Union troopers steadily advanced southward on