Notes & Queries

Notes & Queries EDITED BY BOYD B. STUTLER 517 Main Street Charleston, West Virginia this department is designed as an open forum for researchers into Civü War themes and for readers of Civil War History in general. It is open for questions on and discussions of phases of the Great Conflict and its personnel. Also, we welcome notes on newly discovered, little known, or sidelights on the war. Contributions are invited; address Notes and Queries Editor. QUERIES JVo. 52-Death and Burial of GeneralA. P. HiU: Whüe reading a review of W. W. Hassler's A. P. Hill. Lee's Forgotten General, by Burke Davis, published in a recent number of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, I came across a paragraph that stirred my curiosity. It read: There is one omission, in the opinion of die reviewer, which would have added a bit to the study. Hill's singular burial is not touched upon, nor are the stories of Mrs. Hill's reception of the news of his death—nor the testimony of the two Federal soldiers alleged to have killed the General. I have examined such books as are avaüable to me here in Canada, but do not find the answers to the questions or circumstances mentioned by Burke Davis. In reading Douglas S. Freeman's account of the death of Hill, (Lee's Lieutenants, Volume 3, page 679), I was struck by the apparent lack of a proper guard for the General ifhe had to pass through an area where Federals might be ranging. Freeman's account of Hill's death was a rather pathetic story, the wife singing indoors when the messenger came with the tragic news. But Freeman gives no detaüs of the funeral and does not include the testimony of the men who killed Hill. But he does append a rather ambiguous quotation from a letter 96 written by Dorsey Pender to his wife in 1863, apparently relating to Mrs. Hill. Pender wrote: "I know you are too good a wife to have given me as much anxiety and trouble as she gave the General." Query: What were the unusual features of Mrs. Hill's reception of the news, the singular burial, and where can the testimony of the soldiers be found? Also, what is the answer to Pender's statement? Fred Landon NOTES Germ Warfare, 1864: [By Fairfax Downey, author of Sound of the Guns, The Guns at Gettysburg, and foirmcoming books on the Battle of Brandy Station and a juvenüe, Famous Horses of the Civil War.} The practice ofwaging war with poisonous substances is as old as war itself. The pollution of wells is probably the earliest example. Outstanding instances in modern times are the use of poison gas in World War I and the efforts by German agents to infect with anthrax bacilli American horses and mules being supplied the Allied armies in vast quantities. To find an attempt at germ warfare cropping up in our Civü War seems extraordinary for the time and conditions. Yet that little-known incident is established by the State Department's diplomatic correspondence , newspapers, and other records. Ineffective though it was, the plot, prompted byhighstakes, was deadly in intent. It happened in Bermuda in the days when fast steamers were running the blockade of the Union Navy between those islands and the Confederate port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Munitions, medical, and othersupplies from England, transshipped in Bermuda, werevital to the Confederacy. Scarcely less so was the Southern cotton to the famished English nulls. It was a roaring, flourishing trade, augmented by British luxury goods carried by skippers ofthe runners as side-ventures. Federal frigates, too few and too slow in the earlier war years, could do little to stop it. Their flimsy barrier was derisively called a "paper blockade." Bermuda rejoiced in a prosperity, memorable even in the lush times of the present tourist business. The wages in gold for crews of the runners ran from $5,000 a round trip for the captain to $180 for a fireman, and they spent their money in the drunken-saüor tradition. In the town of St. George's alone (normal population then...