Originally aired on October 20, 1995 - In part 60 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes some of what he refers to as the engaging oddities and events of the Civil War.
#60 – Civil War Oddities
Little things so often make big indentations on our minds. Although General Robert E. Lee is remembered for a host of achievements in his long life, the fact that he wore a 4 ½ C shoe is something the average person cannot forget. The Civil War is full of such small but engaging oddities.
For example, the mammoth 128 volumes of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies contain hundreds of stern dispatches detailing bloody engagements. Yet hidden in the accounts of the 1864 fighting near Atlanta is this unique dispatch.
“General,” a division commander wrote William T. Sherman, “Colonel Brownlow performed one of his characteristic feats today. I had ordered a detachment to cross at Cochran’s Ford. It was deep, and Brownlow took his men over naked, they wearing nothing but guns, cartridge-boxes, and hats. They drove the enemy out of their rifle-pits, captured a non-commissioned officer and three men… They would have got more, but the rebels had the advantage of running through the bushes with their clothes on.”
Near Washington, DC, at the same time occurred another unusual confrontation. A Confederate army was threatening the Northern capital. One afternoon, Abraham Lincoln inspected the city’s defenses. He climbed atop a parapet and was looking at the enemy in the distance when a Union captain came riding down the line. The young officer did not recognize the civilian and shouted: “Get down from there, you damned fool, or you’ll get killed!”
Lincoln climbed down; and with a smile, he said: “Well, Captain, I see you have already learned how to address a civilian.”
The two men never met again. Yet in spite of many postwar accomplishments, the Federal officer never forgot that fleeting moment in wartime. The young captain was Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Ambrose Burnside of Indiana led Union forces to victory at Roanoke Island early in 1862 and led the Army of the Potomac to defeat at Fredericksburg later that year. The most memorable thing about Burnside was his appearance. He wore an awesome set of whiskers that curled down the sides of his face and wound up around his mouth. So outstanding was this growth of hair that a new word came into the American language. The syllables of Burnside’s name were reversed, and “sideburns” came to denote conspicuous facial hair.
Another Union soldier of note was Albert Cashier of Illinois. Cashier enlisted in 1862 at the age of nineteen and saw much action in the Western theatre. At Cashier’s death forty-six years later, a startling revelation came to light: Albert Cashier was a woman. She was not the only female to serve in a Civil War army, but her case is surely unique.
Looking at the past through the judgmental lenses of the present is at least misleading and at most inaccurate. Thanks to giant gains in food preparation and diet, Americans of today are larger than ever in stature. General Ulysses S. Grant was a normal-size soldier of the Civil War. The Union commander was five feet, seven inches tall, and weighed 130 pounds.
One of several candidates for any “Hard-Luck Award” in the Civil War would be Wilmer McLean. This Virginia farmer owned property near Manassas when war came. On a hot July day in 1861, is property became part of the war’s first battlefield. McLean sough peace, so he packed up his family and moved south to a small, quiet, isolated little community. Four years later, the armies marched again onto Wilmer McLean’s property. It was in the front parlor of the McLean home at Appomattox that Generals Grant and Lee signed documents that ended the great sectional conflict.
There is significance in the fact that Mr. McLean had no cause to move again.
