Kelly - Best Little Stories from the Civil War

By C. BRAIN KELLY

WITH

INGRID SMYER

Copyright 1994, 1998, 2010 by C. Brian Kelly and Ingrid Smyer

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kelly, C. Brian.

Best little stories from the Civil War : more than 100 true stories / by C. Brian Kelly; with Ingrid Smyer.2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 1861-1865Anecdotes. I. Smyer-Kelly, Ingrid II. Title.

E655.K25 2009

973.7dc22

2009042114

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

BEST LITTLE STORIES
FROM THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

BEST LITTLE STORIES FROM THE LIFE AND
TIMES OF WINSTON CHURCHILL

BEST LITTLE STORIES
OF THE BLUE AND THE GRAY

BEST LITTLE IRONIES, ODDITIES & MYSTERIES
OF THE CIVILWAR

BEST LITTLE STORIES
FROM THE WHITE HOUSE

BEST LITTLE STORIES
FROM THE WILD WEST

BEST LITTLE STORIES
FROM WORLD WAR II

BEST LITTLE STORIES FROM VIRGINIA

For our children,
Beth, Charlie, Fran, Hal, Jimmy, Katheryn, Sid

HERES OUR PREMISE: HISTORY CAN BE TOLD IN LITTLE BITS AND PIECES AS WELL AS in heavyweight and multi-volume tomes.

All too often, even the best recitals of great events can overlook the basic human story lurking behind those same great events. And thats where our series of Best Little Stories historical books comes into the picture. Thats us history as short, narrative bits.

Butcan that work?

Reviewer Craig. K. Allen seemed to think so, seemed to catch both the intent and flavor of our approach in the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph when he described our Best Little Stories from the White House as a genre not quite practiced by anyone else and said the books stories possess the immediacy of a front-page newspaper article.

Also gratifying was the reaction of Bill Ruelhmann, Books columnist at the Norfolk (Virginia) Virginian Pilot, back in 2002 to our newly published Best Little Stories from the Wild West. Our digging for historical gold in mundane earth, he wrote at that time, had enabled us to prise forth glittering nuggets of nifty narrative that, packed tight in the thick treasure boxes of their paperbound anthologies, make for truly priceless reading.

Thanks of course to Craig and Bill. But how does it work, you may be asking. Best Little Stories, we say? Exactly what does that mean? Well, as I wrote in an earlier edition of this, the first of our three Best Little Stories Civil War books, I once was a newspaperman. I always looked for the good, i.e., the best, story. Be it cheerful, light and frothy, or hard-hitting, sad, poignantit didnt matter. Just the good story. The kind the reader would read. No message, just the unusual, the obscure, the fascinatingthe gripping, the touching human story.

When I turned to history as the first editor of Military History and World War II magazines, I was inclined from the start to treat history as journalismto look for the little nuggets gleaming with pathos, cheer, tragedy, ironythe human-interest stories in history.

Together with my wife and book collaborator Ingrid, I came to call them Best Little Stories in this and our companion historical books (there are nine total as of this writing). Little in part because, yes, the stories may be shorter than historical accounts. But also because in most cases, they focus more on the individual person at, say, Gettysburg, rather than simply report the size of the armies, who won the battle and how they did so.

Rather than write a straightforward, fact-filledbut potentially dullshort biography of U. S. Grant as the Union general who finally won the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln, its far more interesting to recall the little moment when he led his troops toward his first conflict of the entire Civil War with very human fear and trepidation: [M]y heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois.

And then, delicious irony, the enemy he expected to meet just over the brow of the next hill was gone, decamped.

In like fashion, its one thing to take note that the landscape of the Civil War was often peopled by black slaves (keyword: peopled), but its important also to cite their own individual experiences, whether its Booker T. Washington recalling his first moments of freedom, Frederick Douglass reciting his brutal treatment before escaping to freedom, or other, far lesser-known slaves telling their own stories. Or, for that matter, the tale of how the young, newly freed black youth named Booker finally acquired a last name.

But this isnt a book all about soldiers and slaves, which, to judge by many historical accounts, were the principal parties of the Civil War. Instead, our Civil War stories often are about the average civilian, sometimes even special groups. For instance: Congress.

Or, more precisely, read in the pages to follow about a member of Congress who had to ride to his nations capital in an unheated freight car, then had to wear unlaundered shirts and socks for many days at a time, while his wife and children remained at home under constant threat of invasion. Such was life, not all that unusual a case, actually, for a member of Congress from Georgiathe Confederate Congress meeting in Richmond, that is.

Were conditions that much better in Washington, D.C., the Union capital and home to the United States Congress? Undoubtedly, yes. But its easy for us to forget that the Federal capital was an incomplete, even primitive urban center by modern standards. Not a sewer blessed the town, nor off of Pennsylvania Avenue was there a paved gutter, wrote Ohio Congressman Albert G. Riddle, albeit with perhaps some exaggeration.

Meanwhile, First Bull Run in the first July of the Civil War was a rout of the Federal forces defending the same Washington, D.C., correct? Quite so, and so easy to recite today as part of any listing of the major battles of the Civil War. But the real sense of the panic among the retreating Union forces comes through from the onlooking Congressman Riddles own eyewitness account of the retreat.