Robert A. Mills, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Robert A. Mills
AURA LEE - CONCLUSION 1/31/2010 9:47:40 AM
AURA LEE - CONCLUSION
Scoffie Goodis never made it back to Milledgeville or Augusta and the Roberts Divinity Institute. He was killed at Gettysburg during the third and most futile effort of Picket’s Charge. He did not, however, die instantly when grapeshot exploded over his head, but he was severely injured. When the Confederates loaded their thousands of wounded on springless wagons, flatbeds of hardwood, rough vehicles with broken or missing wheels, many of them uncovered, and rolled desperately over muddy and rutted roads in relentless cold rain, hoping for respite across the Potomac in Maryland, the most seriously wounded, men like Scoffie, begged for a quick and sure death, as they had no longanimity to continue such abject suffering. For some, again like Scoffie, it came with tremendous gust even before raddled wagons reached the swollen stream. Ironically, during the entire war he had only twice fired his rifle, and he died knowing the first had missed while believing with gratitude that the second had also probably missed (it had.)
Private Hunter Worboys left the war a sergeant. He miraculously survived one battle after the other, including the three days of hell at Gettysburg where wasted lives piled upon wasted lives that built mountains of blue and gray dead nearly as high as the battered swells the generals insisted had to be conquered or defended; and he continued in the thick of it until the very end. He, unlike his friend, fired his rifle often—although he, too, never knowingly hit anyone. On the first day, he had become separated from Scoffie and never saw him again. He spent three frustrating weeks searching an area of twenty-five square miles, but he did not know Scoffie had been wounded and carted away, and it was five months before he learned Scoffie was dead and never coming home. Back in Milledgeville, Hunter eventually resumed his studies at Roberts and became an energetic and well-liked teacher of Bible history at Southern State University. Surprising everyone, himself most of all, he comforted and consoled, then courted and finally married Mary Lynne Crumb, Scoffie’s intended. They had nine children, all boys, all baptized with the middle name Scoffield.
Private Barton “Mitch” Mitchell, the young Yankee from Indiana who had found Robert E. Lee’s Battle Plan No. 191 in that Maryland cornfield, was never officially recognized by the Army of the Potomac for accidentally discovering the document attributed by historians to shortening the war by many months, if not years. When Lincoln asked General George McClellan how they’d come by such a vital piece of information, the general had no idea. “It was brought to me by a courier near Frederick. I think it was handed over by some Rebel spy, or some such.” Pvt. Mitchell, in a roundabout way, did however receive an unexpected reward: loading a caisson a few days after he and Eccles Heffner had smoked the cigars that had been wrapped in the precious paper, his ankle was badly turned. Believing the bone to be broken, he was sent by a sympathetic captain to a military hospital in Georgetown where he remained hobbling about while the rest of his detachment marched to Gettysburg and virtual oblivion. Mitchell survived the war and returned to Indiana and the family farm where he lived to a ripe old age: eighty-eight. For forty years after the war, he told the story many times of finding the Confederate battle plan, but he never felt that anyone truly believed him or took him seriously. On his seventieth birthday he vowed never to tell the story again—and he didn’t.
Daniel Menefee did not live to see the son Melissa was carrying during the time of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Daniel, then a Union corporal after his defection, was killed at Gettysburg while trying to stop Rebels from ransacking a private home, Rebels who were bent on avenging the federal destruction of Fredericksburg. But a Confederate soldier didn’t kill him. He was shot dead in the kitchen by a nine-year old girl named Lucy Gow, who suddenly leaped from the pantry brandishing a huge pistol. Daniel stopped, looked at her, smiling, and said, “Gimme that ol’ gun, gal,” and she did, firing it point blank and hitting Daniel square between the eyes. When the bullet went through his brain, the back of his head flew out the kitchen window.
Melissa, after Hooker’s ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville, said goodbye to Daniel and departed for western North Carolina to birth her baby and wait out the war for Daniel’s return. When she received word that he had died in that desolate Pennsylvania village, she vowed she would never marry again; she would devote her life to raising their son: Daniel Abraham Menefee. Unfortunately, Melissa joined her beloved husband in death in 1907, at the age of sixty-four, a year before their son was elected to his first of several terms as a U.S. Senator from North Carolina.
Captain William Jameson, III, having gotten off the shot that so seriously wounded “Stonewall” Jackson, was left for several days in that clearing near Chancellorsville; his body was eventually picked up and sent back to VMI where, egregiously, he wound up being buried with much pomp and ceremony in a revered place set aside for genuine heroes at VMI. His headstone reads: The Officer Who Gave His Life Trying to Protect the Savior of the Confederacy. “One Fewer Shot and T.J. Jackson Would Have Lived To Win the War.”
For a time after General Jackson’s death, Joseph Morrison served as Adjutant of the 57th North Carolina Regiment in Brig. Gen. Hoke’s Brigade. Upon being promoted to captain, he was assigned to command Company F, 57th N.C. Regiment under Col. A.C. Godwin. Ironically, he was captured twice by Union soldiers but managed to escape both times. The first time was when he hastened to Richmond to bring his sister to her dying husband’s side. He was traveling on a train loaded with wounded soldiers when Yankees captured the train. He escaped within minutes and, aided by local civilians, made his way to Richmond and Mrs. Jackson. He was later captured again toward the end of the war, but he merely walked away when the Union soldiers apparently lost interest, realizing there was no point in keeping prisoners anymore. Toward the end this was not unusual on either side.
Morrison finished out his tour of duty with the rank of captain, and when the war was finally over and General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, he returned to his home in Lincoln, North Carolina. Having contracted tuberculosis, he later immigrated to California where he tried his hand at politics but was defeated in a run for the state legislature. He returned to North Carolina in 1872, got married, settled down as a gentleman farmer, and raised an abundant family. His great-grandson, Joseph Graham Morrison IV, today lives in Acworth, Georgia, and he delights in regaling interested history buffs, such as this author, with tales of his paternal hero’s exploits with Old Blue Light.
Less than two years after Stonewall Jackson’s demise, John Wilkes Booth, uninvited and uncontested, entered the Presidential Box at Ford’s Theater in 10th Street in Washington, and in cold blood, mortally wounded Abraham Lincoln by firing one .50 caliber shot into the chief executive’s brain. Leaping unmolested from the box to the stage, the deranged thespian broke his leg but somehow managed to scream out his final line—Sic semper tyrannis!—and exit the theater backstage to mount a waiting steed. The unfortunate horse, handicapped with two saddlebags containing eight thousand dollars in gold, barely made it across the Anacostia River when an Army sentry halted the assassin to inquire why he was traveling so late. Booth, nearly delirious with pain, said, “I’m John Wilkes Booth, and I live near Beantown!” Unaccountably, all security officers on duty had been forewarned by the War Department that any anxious horseman was to be unimpeded in his flight, no matter how curious the circumstances.
A few minutes later co-conspirator David Herold was stopped at the bridge by the same sentry who later remembered the nervous rider identifying himself as “Smith;” he said he lived in White Plains, Maryland. He was waved on and finally rendezvoused with Booth at the roadhouse owned by Mary Surratt, where they quickly packed in an additional two thousand dollars in gold.
Earlier, while Booth was about his baneful business at Ford’s Theater, Herold had escorted one Lewis Powell (often called Lewis Paine, a young man of twenty who was enthralled of Tom Paine and his revolutionary writings) to the home of Secretary of State William Seward—his mission being to assassinate the Cabinet member as a further addendum to the Grand Conspiracy. Others, such as George Atzeroldt, had been assigned diabolical tasks as insidious as eliminating Vice President Andrew Johnson in his rooms at the Kirkwood House.
Despite seriously wounding the secretary by slashing him numerous times with a Bowie knife, Seward miraculously was able to eventually recuperate, even though he was badly scarred and disfigured. Six others in his household were attacked and injured that fateful night by a berserk Powell-Paine, and somehow all survived.
The Vice President, however, went unharmed, as Atzeroldt, a miserable coward, could not complete his mission. He was apprehended lying facedown in the bushes, vomiting and crying hysterically.
At Mary Surratt’s roadhouse, Booth moaned, “I have to have whiskey or I shall amputate my own leg!” Mrs. Surratt gave him a quart of rye, and he gulped down half the bottle in less than two minutes. It did no good. Before dawn they mounted up and rode to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd. After setting the actor’s leg and allowing the fugitives an hour of rest, Mudd woke them and insisted they leave immediately.
For five wretched days Booth and his accomplice hid in several places enroute to Bowling Green, near Front Royal, and the Virginia plantation of one Richard Garrett, upon whose land sat the barn under which resided the steamer trunks containing nine hundred fifty thousand dollars in gold bullion.
On the morning of April 26 a detachment from the 16th New York Cavalry invaded the Garrett plantation to find Booth and Herold digging frantically in the barn. Lt. Edward Doherty shouted through the locked barn door for them to surrender their arms and come out with their hands up. A private who had sneaked behind the barn lighted a match to some straw, and a fire erupted, which began to spread quickly through parts of the barn. Herold immediately dropped his shovel and handed his rifle to Booth, screaming out, “I had nothing to do with killing anyone!”
A sergeant named Boston Corbett was peering through an open slat in the barn’s west side, leveling the long barrel of his military pistol against a protruding nail, when Booth suddenly grasped his shovel and hopped on one leg in a menacing fashion toward the open slat. Corbett fired, hoping to merely stop him with a shot in the arm. But Booth, hobbling about as he was, veered at the last second, and the bullet struck him in the back of the head, ironically an mere inch below the exact spot where Lincoln had been shot and killed a few days earlier.
The bullet severed the brain stem precisely where it joined his spinal column, and Booth collapsed to the ground, paralyzed. His only words were, “Useless! Useless!” He lingered in a coma for several hours and gasped his last breath shortly after seven that evening. On his person was found a diary (confiscated by the military, contents and whereabouts unknown to this day,) a large Bowie knife, two pistols (one of which is believed, but unconfirmed, to have been the weapon used in the assassination,) a compass, and a Canadian bank draft for sixty pounds.
On July 7, 1865, David Herold and three other conspirators—Mrs. Mary Surratt, George Atzeroldt, and Lewis Powell-Paine—having been found guilty of a litany of capital offenses, were publicly hanged. Dr. Samuel Mudd was also found guilty of aiding and abetting a known federal fugitive, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Although President Andrew Johnson pardoned him four years later, his family and heirs have spent more than a century unsuccessfully trying to overturn his conviction, expunge the record, and clear his name.
The flagitious remains of John Wilkes Booth were taken to the Old Penitentiary in Washington, D.C. (in what later became Fort McNair), wrapped in an army blanket, and buried unceremoniously beneath the cement slab floor of a solitary confinement cell. Two years later the body was exhumed and placed in a pine box, which was stored in Warehouse No. 1 at the prison. Another two years went by before the body was released to the Booth family by the government—it was noted that due to repeated disinterment, the head had separated from the body—and the dismembered corpse was now transported to Baltimore to be buried in the Booth family plot in Green Mount Cemetery. The gravesite was never kept up, and according to the undertaker, Henry Mears, when Edwin Booth was asked if he wished a headstone or flowers, the older brother replied, “Let it remain as it is—unmarked, unattended, and unvisited.”
Curiously, no record of the disposition of the gold bullion was ever discovered, either what supposedly was in the saddlebags or buried in the barn. The Garrett plantation was abandoned by that family before the end of the century, and it was eventually bought by a group of S.G.s who turned it into a monastery and refuge for aged, ill and downtrodden actors and writers. It burned down in 1932 and was never rebuilt. Today the land, overgrown and neglected, sits barren and desolate not far from a busy interstate highway.
Mortally wounded, an unconscious Abraham Lincoln, after being briefly attended by a Ford Theater patron, a Dr. Herman Stoner, was carried across the street to the Peterson Boarding House and placed diagonally on a bed in a second floor room. Dr. Stoner, after examining the President along with two other doctors who had been summoned, said, “There is nothing can be done for him.” Lincoln never regained consciousness. At seven twenty-two he next morning, he was pronounced dead; Secretary Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the angels.” Filing out, leaving the President alone with his wife and his two sons grieving at the bedside, the Cabinet members and others who had remained throughout the night shuffled away in a state of shock and sorrow. At the bottom of the narrow staircase, Gideon Welles touched Edwin Stanton’s arm and asked, “What was it you said when the President died?” Stanton looked at his colleague through blurred eyes. “I don’t know,” he whispered, hoarsely. “I think,” said Welles (and later wrote in his diary,) “you said, ‘Now he belongs to the ages.’” Stanton seemed to shrug. “I guess so,” he replied.
Alvinas Turner stayed behind at the White House, at the request of Andrew Johnson, to supervise packing up Lincoln’s books, papers, and files in the second floor Presidential Sanctorum.. In the third drawer from the top, on the left-hand side of the desk, the old retainer found a letter sitting facedown and unfinished. It was written in the President’s own hand, dated April 3, 1865, but it was neither addressed nor signed. It read:
. . . war’s a burden carried on the backs of innocent bystanders. No nation should have to wear the mantel of civil insurrection unless it is to remove the despot, the dictator, the inhuman maggot who preys on his own kith and kin.
Thank God we are now nearly done, and by the grace of the God we thank, it would appear this nation shall survive and endure. Fortune has been exceedingly good, as the merits of our victory are few; we rejoice in sailing a shallow ship of glory.
My mistakes well surpass my achievements, if, in fact, history will accord me any worthy of note. The business of Thomas Jackson will stand out as my greatest error and poorest judgment. So unnecessary! So regrettable! So unlike any other blemish on my soul!
There are moments when I would forfeit the conclusion of this great struggle were I able to relinquish that one decision.
The letter ended there. Turner folded it once and placed it in his breast pocket. Later that day, he sought out Gideon Welles and handed the letter to him.
“Why do you give this to me?” asked the saddened Secretary of the Navy.
“’Cause Ah cain’t read,” Turner said, his voice cracking. “But Ah knows Massa Lincoln wrote it. Ah knows his scraw’. Ah ‘magine he want you tuh have it. Can you tell me what it say?”
Welles unfolded the paper and adjusted his spectacles. He took more than a moment to read what the President had written. Then he re-folded the letter and placed it in his pocket.
The secretary spoke softly. “He says he wanted to thank all the people who took care of him and his family. He especially said thanks to you in particular. He called you his close and devoted—friend.”
The letter, along with another Welles possessed, one written by General Joseph Hooker, was displayed, but unnoticed, in the Smithsonian until the Presidential Wing was remodeled in 1936. They were both then placed in an unmarked box and moved to a large room where other nondescript Lincoln papers were archived, and they were never publicly displayed or privately perused again.
* * *
Born six months apart within a short distance in rural Kentucky, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln might have been playmates as children had Fate bestowed even more coincidences upon their families. But if Lincoln would join the ages to be regarded by the vast majority as the Other Son of God, Davis was considered by as many to be the Brother of Satan and the American heir apparent to Judas Iscariot. History suggests it was an unfair comparison, although most Northerners and many Southerners today peg him as one of the country’s greatest losers.
A graduate of West Point and a wounded and decorated hero in the battles of Buena Vista and Monterrey during the Mexican War, he fought bravely and meritoriously alongside Jackson, Hooker, Meade, Burnside, Grant, and many other notable West Pointers. Davis’ first marriage was to the daughter of Zachary Taylor, short-lived though it was due to her untimely death. Politically, he rose to U.S. Congressman, and then to U.S. Senator. He served under President Franklin Pierce as Secretary of War, but he did not, however, come by the Presidency of the Confederacy with much ease, as he was not even the first or second choice.
His overall mismanagement of every aspect of the Civil War his greatest legacy, and with the South in virtual ruins, he escaped from Richmond only to be captured near the hamlet of Irwinville, Georgia. He was thrown in jail for treason and badly mistreated for two years before his sudden release prior to trial—the North did not want him tried for fear of acquittal, and the South for just the opposite reason. He fled to England where he lived unhappily for several years and returned home to his plantation in Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico, near Biloxi, in time to finish, before his death in 1889, a two-volume tome called The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, a ponderously dull, tediously pretentious, badly-written history of the South that was and is rarely read, its valuable insights notwithstanding.
“Stonewall” Jackson’s left arm, by the time it was exhumed by his surgeon, Dr. Hunter McGuire, who had buried it rather than simply tossed on the ever-growing pile of discarded limbs behind the field hospital, had deteriorated and decayed inside its canvas coffin to such a degree that Lt. Joe Morrison quickly re-wrapped it and added a dozen hemp stitches to the edge of the bag. He gently placed the package in his saddlebag for the trip over to Lexington, Virginia, where the appendage would be buried with its former owner in a plot not far from the Virginia Military Institute.
The great general was dead, having passed while his beloved wife, Mary Anna, holding their infant daughter, Julia, wept at his bedside just nine days after being shot at Chancellorsville. It was on May 10, 1863, and he never truly came to full realization of the great victory the Confederacy had achieved at that obscure crossroads in the Wilderness.
The morning Dr. McGuire told Mary Anna that her husband most certainly would die before sunset, she sat by Jackson’s bed, and she told him that this was the day he would be with the Lord.
He said, “No, my dearest, it is not all that bad.” But when Dr. McGuire came into the room, the general asked him, “Am I to die today?” The doctor replied, “Yes, sir, I believe that is true.”
“Good,” said Jackson, “very good. I have always desired to die on Sunday.” And then Old Blue Light was silent for a while, perhaps drifting into a coma, and suddenly he was heard to cry out, startling everyone in the room: “Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly!”
Dr. McGuire took Mary Anna Jackson’s hand in his and gently suggested they take Julia outside. Mrs. Jackson said no: “He would want her with him. He saw so little of her, but she is his true happiness and spirit, as only a daughter can be to an absent father.”
“She’s but a child,” the doctor said, softly.
“I know,” Mary Anna replied. “And she will remember none of this. She cannot comprehend what this man’s death, though he is her father, means to the history and destiny of this world and life as we know it.”
The general must have heard her, for he turned slightly, as best he could, and looked at his baby daughter in his sad wife’s arms. A smile of ineffable sweetness spread over his pale face, and his glistening, brilliant blue eyes softened at the sight of her. He looked at her for a long time, and then at his wife; and his last words were: “Let us pass over the river and rest in the shade, under the trees.”
With that, the champion of Shenandoah, of McDowell, Front Royal, 1st Winchester, of Cross Key, Port Republic, Harper’s Ferry, the Seven Days, Cedar Mountain, Manassas, Sharpsburg, of Fredericksburg, and of Chancellorsville—was gone.
Jackson died, not directly of lumbar pneumonia as was widely reported, but of a pulmonary embolism, a huge blood clot in his lungs that virtually dammed up life’s flow to his heart. Death came quickly, and nothing then known to medicine could have saved him.
His grave today is prominent in the small town of Lexington. At the base of the monument placed there, is an inscription, which reads:
For centuries men will come to Lexington as a Mecca, and to this grave as a shrine, and wonderingly talk of this man and his mighty deeds. Time will only add to his great fame—his name will be honored and revered forever.
