Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam

3. Stonewall and a Virginia Reel

3( Stonewall and a Virginia Reel clarissa harlowe barton had not intended going into nursing . The daughter of an old New England Indian War veteran, Clara taught school and remained single. She eventually found a niche as a copyist at the Patent Office in Washington. When the war came, she became obsessed with voluntarily carrying supplies to the troops in the field—nourishing food, but more especially hospital items like bandages, salves, sheets, bed shirts, and stimulants. She cut through army and Sanitary Commission bureaucracies that claimed war and battlefront were not places for women. She conveyed her supplies to Ambrose Burnside’s debarking troops at Fredericksburg in early August. Then, on August 9, she learned of Cedar Mountain. By August 13, she had reached the gore and suffering of Dr. James L. Dunn’s blood-splattered hospital in Culpeper. For two days, without sleep, she scrubbed floors and passed out supplies. Dunn wrote his wife, “If heaven ever sent out a homely angel, she must be one, her assistance was so timely.”1 One captain at a neighboring hospital told her, “Miss Barton, this is a rough and unseemly position for you, a woman, to occupy.” She shot back, “Is it not as rough and unseemly for these pain-racked men?” Returning to Washington, she penned an impassioned public letter, dated “Culpeper Court House, August 14, 1862,” portraying the pathos of the post–Cedar Mountain scene. She also spoke of “the 66 | stonewall and a virginia reel nobility of soul, the resignation, and bravery of our gallant troops” that she found in the impoverished field hospitals. She needed new sources of supplies for her crusade. Newspaper publication of her letter would inspire the home front. “It is well to be a soldier,” she pronounced, but later admitted that a “sense of propriety” had kept her from the actual battlefield.2 Cedar Mountain left a distinct impression on participants. For many it was their first battle; for others it was their second or third experience . Pvt. James Miller of the 111th Pennsylvania claimed that it had captured the “enthusiastic dream of my boyhood,” a battle filled with “glorious pomp and stern reality.” But the carnage also translated into lost friends and colleagues. As John Mead Gould, newly promoted to first lieutenant in the Tenth Maine, recorded bluntly, it took “thirty minutes to drop 170 out of 460” combatants in his unit. One officer had been shot before even entering the fight, a victim of his highcrowned black regulation Hardee hat with ostrich plume and brass emblems. Gould described robbing the dead of boots, clothing, and valuables and the fact that almost every survivor had some scratch on him. His regiment’s noble performance had been to little purpose, as the enemy “had us completely at their mercy.” By regulation he should have been mounted, but an accident kept him on foot. “I would as soon have blown my brains out as to have gone into that musketry fire mounted.”3 The last trainload of wounded arrived in Alexandria from Culpeper on August 18. Rumors had John Pope abandoning the town and environs and pulling back behind the Rappahannock River. Both sides spent time the fortnight following Cedar Mountain planning and jockeying for position. The stakes were high, as Louisianan Reuben Allen Pierson indicated to his brother in Mississippi, four days before Cedar Mountain. Everyone looked to England and France “for mediation or at least recognition,” he wrote. Pierson personally had little faith in mediation but thought that public clamor would demand recognition and separation “from the vile Fanatics of the North.” Pennsylvanian James Miller, by contrast, felt that if any of the folks at home thought they were experiencing hard times due to the conflict, they should come to Virginia and see the desolation, with thousandacre farms stripped of all fencing, crops, and livestock in a single day. The only way that the owners could get payment, he thought, was “to prove that they are union men and this is going on in thirty places stonewall and a virginia reel | 67 at once.” Since leaving Harpers Ferry to reinforce Pope, Miller had not seen twenty able-bodied young men because the Rebels had conscripted them all.4 Miller thought it a pity if loyal Northerners could not make as large sacrifices to support the Constitution and the laws as the Confederates could to...