University of Virginia Center or civil war history. Its just under 40 minutes. See if there is something from the audience first, and if there was not, we will pick it up from up here. If anyone has questions, just raise your hand. Here come the mike bearers. My question is really for anyone who feels compelled to answer it. Im curious sherman used the labor code and confiscation act. Im curious if sheridan did the same. Did he use any sort of legal justifications, or was it simply a soldier obeying orders from grant . And im curious if residents of chambersburg and western maryland have a sort of popular collective memory about their sort of tragedy. Ill talk about that part later. After my colleagues and he first question. One of the interesting hings i think the significance of the lieber code is more postcivil war. Theres no reference in anything grant wrote or in any of the papers of ulysses s. Grant to the lieber code. Nothing. And i assure you, sherman did not care about it at all either. I think there was a kind of full knowledge. Full folk knowledge. He found very little complaining in the confederacy about Union Destruction of military value. That was the reason why going through the doors and going through words clothing Womens Clothing seemed like a violation that only a gender norms but between personal and professional. Of what value could this be to Union Soldiers . Sheridan, too, comes up with a lot of rationales for why he did these things. During the war, they have things to do, and grant says destroy it. Make it a arren waste, so sheridan had pretty clear instructions what to do. Compared to hunter, and when to remember we need to remember it is only weeks apart. Sounds like a long period of time, but its really not. Its much more focused on destroying the food that would become military elements not going to leaves army. I think that is the distinction. You need to keep in mind that during the vicksburg campaign, grant sent sherman into jackson to destroy anything of military value, and then grant and sherman had come up with this rating concept that sherman experimented with in the Meridian Campaign in january 1864. The intention, if you regrets orders to sherman, is to break up johnstons army and penetrate through the confederacy wrecking anything of military value, and i think that the way those guys perceived their duties. The chambersburg writing is kind of off the grid the chambersburg burning is kind of ff the grid. People from chambersburg have sent all the money out of town. Theres nothing to give, and theres union forces not far away. We know they are not far away and they are going to be here any minute now, and they stall. Finally, he says you may be stalling and waiting for the union army to come, so we are going to burn the city. If you visit today, theres a big monument about how much was destroyed, counting of the number of houses and how much it was worth, but this also a starstudded to the square of where lee stood before he went to gettysburg, and they have every year a memorial as they had a reenactment with lasers and all this of the burning of the city and kind of a pageant when they are doing it, and its not clear. The good guys and bad guys are a little blurrier than you might think. It was a huge deal at the time. Harpers weekly, i think, is filled with pictures of burn chambersburg. It specifically tied to the kind of thing that happened in chambersburg to what had happened earlier in lexington. There is nothing new were doing here. This is simply something the yanks have been doing a long time and now we are giving them a dose of their own medicine. Most confederates were very happy to hear that chambersburg had had this experience. I will add that frederick, who does one of the towns that pays the ransom in the month or so after appomattox when these parolees are coming home, frederick is one of the communities that establishes vigilante committees, unionists, to prevent some of those maryland confederates katie talked about earlier from coming into their confederacy. This is one way in which they say you are not coming back here. Its not the only county in maryland that does it, but they are very selfconsciously tying it to the request threat for ransom. Relative to joes, before about this happening earlier, historians have argued a lot that does the war become more destructive over time . Im trying to thread the needle as im describing all of this. Are they more bloodthirsty at the end than they were at the beginning . I dont know that they were. I resist the idea that this is likely to descend into some sort of armageddon. All the elements are there from buried in knew the beginning anyway. The Union Artillery shelled fredericksburg. The confederacy using towns as shelters, so they shelled the city of redericksburg, and a significant number of civilians, black and white, became refugees, but there are things going on in 1864, and this is one of them. Every day, there is contact punctuated by various battles. After gettysburg, its 10 months before there is another battle. After the eastern wilderness, its two days, so it really is different in that regard, too, and we are now ready for another question. You already ave the mic. Im sorry, we will have to take that away from you. Thank you all very much. Wonderful talks. I was really curious about the fluid nature of the the events you describe after april 9. In the beginning, you talked about the exchange of letters about what extent grants orders really apply to everyone else, so it got me thinking about to what extent the Lincoln Administration and union high command is engaged in some sort of planning before these events take place to anticipate a hopeful mass surrender and try to create a legal and practical framework to execute that. The short answer is that they do not think out these things other than the conversations lincoln has had with grant and sherman and others in late march. What grant is doing is trying to get the surrender of lees army. Im not faulting him for this, but thats not on his mind or his agenda on april 9, but as he becomes apparent that there re these thousands of men and i will add that there are men coming back to the line. It is apparent Something Else has to be done, just like terms offer the morning of the 10th when grant says we will allow your men to take u. S. Railways when necessary to get home. These are constantly evolving and constantly responding to events that take place. I would be remiss if i did not give a special thanks to patrick schroeder, who is here from appomattox courthouse, who has been absolutely instrumental in helping me with this research. Just wanted to give him a nod, too. On information i have read, as far as when lee finished up and they were just going home and some of his subordinates wanted to keep fighting and he says no, but i see johnson still out there. He was the head of the entire Confederate Army at that point. Did he have the right to say we are done . It is not grants decision to say sherman tried a version of that. Johnson was reeled in quickly and joe can talk about that. That is not within lees purview. When the war is over is a political decision, not the decision the general makes. I was thinking about the previous question, and the i was thinking about the confederates want to meet, and grant receives instructions from the Lincoln Administration that he can negotiate only matters that are relevant to his own army and the armys opposing him , and, of course, lincoln never would have imagined that he would be assassinated, but he may have made a mistake at that point, and it might have and wiser for him to have thought through these matters, but here is one of those classic situations where people are in washington and really do not understand what is going on out in the field and that if you can get all these people surrendered and paroled on the terms that grant, which by the way, he just sat down at the desk and appomattox and wrote out the original copy is at west point. You even see where he wrote in the comment where lee was saying many of the offices have horses that they own, so grant sketches that in. This is composed right on the scene. They have not devoted sufficient time to prepare for the end of the war. But it unfolds really rapidly. Yes, it does. No one could have imagined the army of Northern Virginia had become the great bugaboo in the United States, and the notion that it really disintegrates in one week i think would have come as a surprise to people. 60,000 at least forces combined and maybe a little higher than that, and in one week, they are gone . I think no one was really prepared for that. The bugaboo with sherman is that grant has been told by leahy he can only negotiate the surrender of the army. This is what gets sherman in so much trouble. Its about surrendering the army. Theres no peace negotiation going on at appomattox. This is lee surrendering his army and his army alone. Remember, the union is arguing these are our people. You do not surrender your own people, you know what i mean . They have to give up arms. Theres no negotiation here. This is not a foreign country. Thats the basis for the union. Do you remember the classic line where lincoln is disgusted, i cant by generals realize that it is all our territory . Why cant my generals realize that it is all our territory . You mentioned out of the four confederates who held up he train, only two of them were captured. You briefly mentioned the other two work paroled. Why were they not rought up on these charges later or executed . Theres actually no trial. Theres no courtmartial. Nothing happens. The men that re captured are taken back across the mountain and executed that evening. In fact, they called for a chaplain of the chaplain does not even get there in time. The father, george summers, arrived that evening to claim his suns body. The other two managed to escape. They had gotten word they literally managed to escape with their homes and had gotten word the Union Cavalry was on its way and made for the hills. Did the local Community Protect them the local did the local Community Protect them the local community helped protect them, as was often the case, and it is months, months later when they are actually pardoned. They managed to escape and are protected, which is the key part, that the local Community Rallies around them. Anyone else . Right in the front. It was not very long ago when we were hearing a lot of japanese slogans off some island of the pacific. How many confederate soldiers just walked away and went home . I dont know the exact numbers, but many of them years later in the 1880s or 1890s will proudly boast in memoirs, etters, and otherwise that they were never paroled. On one hand, you have certificates from appomattox that are proof of men who stayed there, as proof of their devotion to the confederacy, and on the other hand, you have these men who say their devotion was even more so because they never surrendered and are very proud of that fact. Im hiding behind that tree over there. Right. There was one point in terms of escalations in the valley they did reach the point of retaliatory hanging in the valley between custer and mosby, but the question about restraint comes in because they didnt hold back from that on both sides. Mosby, as i mentioned in passing that mosby is the one exception. Its mosby himself, not his men that are the exception. Mosby is the exception, but very quickly then, and theres the correspondence that goes back and forth, multiple correspondence, multiple letters in a single day among the union high command about how should we deal with mosby. At one point, troops are being sent to go hunt him down. This is april 10, april 11. Long story short, there are two occasions in which he meets with Union Officials to talk about surrendering his command. Ultimately, he decides not to your it unable 21st at salem, now marshall, virginia, he will disband his rangers. That same day, about 200 of them arrived in winchester to turn themselves in, so they go immediately. Some of them hadgo. If you of them had come in on april 19, but they scatter to their homes, so they are assigning roles in Louisa County and charlottesville and elsewhere. Mosby wont find his parole until june. Then he becomes republican. Then he becomes republican. A little local color, if you go to apple lynchburg road, there is a house where mosby i knew that they created a subdivision called Mosby Mountain and it is now engulfed it has now engulfed mosbys old house. I just imagine the ghost of John Singleton mosby wondering the Mosby Mountain subdivision. Maybe you think about exploring the memory. No sheridan lane, probably. This institution ought to celebrate sheridans birthday hadar because at the he a great his orders, this institution would probably be down in lynchburg had he obeyed his orders, this institution would probably be down in lynchburg. When i was reading the book on mexico, one of the chapters talks about all the confederate soldiers that went to mexico and half their families would pay for their children to go to university and they also got involved with the oil and as years went on, in the 30s, they were after our government to be more accommodating to the oil that was being drilled by the confederates families, and i never heard any historic historian referred to the confederates that ended up in mexico. They can create their own town in brazil where they have ceremonies in the confederacy. There is a book on it. National geographic did a big story with pictures. There is a small literature on that. Some went to cuba, some went to mexico, some went to egypt. There are former confederates that go in many directions. Some in new york. Some do, and there is a really wretched movie about some that went to mexico with john wayne in it. It is wretched, it really is. It is called the undefeated. Yes, way in the back. It may have been too short of didnt have any ratifications in the wake of the africanamericans but did it have any ratifications in the wake of the africanamericans . They were moving so fast and by this time, slavery had been that is the calculation you have to make if you are a slave person. Here is a army on one side of the other, but even the Confederate Army provides an opportunity. But they are gone. This and thell of turnover is so great. It was greatly increasing your odds. Time, the main place to go was washington, d. C. The population increased by tens of thousands. This happened this happen earlier in the valley, when the confederates, when Stonewall Jackson capture the garrison at Harpers Ferry. He also captured several hundred like refugees who made their way to the union lines. A number of womens diaries comment on this, that these men had been recaptured by confederates. They made their way to Harpers Ferry, which was controlled by United States military forces and they were returned to slavery when Harpers Ferry fell to Stonewall Jackson in midseptember. The bigger impact came the year before, during the invasion of pennsylvania by lees armie. One of the first things they did was roundup africanamerican people and ship them back to richmond. Of spending a lot of their time and energy as they first come into pennsylvania, to kidnap people into slavery and chased them through wheatfields and chase them through wheatfields. The scale is very different. There was there just werent the percentage. The war had been going on for a long time, and it was easy to get to union lines from virginia. Orre was a great quotation rather a letter from a confederate soldier who had been talking to a former governor of virginia. In 1864, slavery is a dead issue in virginia. Wasionale was was even if the confederacy won, so many slaves had already run off and that is going to be a buffer state for the institution of slavery because the union is not going to return runaway slaves. Realistically, you will not be able to keep slaves in most of virginia. That is the reason i was talking about virginia is unusual in that yourd, but by the time know it had been remarkably undisturbed by the war, the time it arrived, so these micro geographies, the different parts of the valley, slavery was really destroyed. In other parts, it was not easy to get to the union army if you were in places like amherst or augusta county. Hadmber of enslaved people increased by hundreds and there was an article saying that all the work is being done by white people. To give you a clear sense of how devastating slavery was west of the blue ridge. We dont really have that clear picture. Monaural county was one of the heaviest slaveholding counties in the union and it is not that far from richmond and yet here, basically, untouched and in the number of 3 million. That is true in 1865. Which is why it is so important to understand military history to understand africanAmerican History. People just imagine that it is dissolved, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Every collective answer is very long as you have figured out. Does anybody else want to venture a question . I did not mean that you have a Chilling Effect that to have a Chilling Effect. [laughter] my question is for dr. Janie. On the Matthew Matthew presented map you presented, i noticed there were none in southwest virginia and i was curious as to why that was. That is based on research that i have done at the National Archives where i found the parole records. I can show you a poor quality image of one of those from newmarket. Complete, but i think the closest pearl station pearl station was in charleston. Any paroled station was interest in. Instances, the u. S. Calvary is being sent to places or places that they know that men have congregated. Around the norfolk area, in king george county, there are reports coming in that there are a lot of fun paroled confederates in this is of unparoled confederates in this area. Did you have your hand up . Thank you. Can someone clarify, so after ,heridan arrives in the valley it is still about a month before the actual fighting begins. Can you clarify on why they waited so long . Im sure early was expecting an attack. Even more than a month. The reason was that grant was under the delusion that earlys armory was much larger than it was an early sent part of the troops act to troops back to lee and at that point he felt that sheridan had a much butter a much better opportunity of reaching his goals. The federals overestimate early force and earlys lee grotesquely underestimates the federal forces. He was facing a force approximately the size of his own, even deep into the campaign when he was facing to three times as many men as he had. One of his biggest miscalculations in the war. If you are not on the ground, you dont know what is going on and lee did not know what was going on. This miscalculation sort of continues. Early has this sort of reputation of incompetence hung around his neck, even though he is fighting much larger armies. He blames his own men, so that does not help. Ill see that anybody Stonewall Jackson would not have prevailed against philip sheridan. Not with so many calvary armed with repeating carbines. The firepower advantage was monumentally union favored. I want to ask. We have talked a little bit about memory. I would like your thoughts about why it is that sherman and sheridan became such great villains when what they were doing was carrying out very clearly and there was no mystery, they were carrying out grants orders. Grant does not seem to get drawn into the debate very often. He is outside them. We should get joan to answer that one. Would you please get a microphone . [laughter] jack. E move, the obvious answer would be that sherman and sheridan were with groups with the troops and grant was not. I think that is part of it, but it is clear that it is grants decision. Absolutely. That certainly seems to me hunter is still the one that hated so much in the valley. It is disproportionate. This is purely anecdotal on my part. It is sheridan. Looking at augusta and lexington. I think it is sheridan. Sheridan would be right behind sherman. I always thought sheridan was worse than sherman. Irish prejudice coming into play, there. He was short and irish and his hat was too small. I think you are letting sheridan off the hook. There is a monument in dayton. Its a plaque made out to a major from ohio Infantry Group who refused sheridans orders to burn dayton. When you burn dayton, you are not burning barns of food, you are burning homes. That is part of the retaliation about masons son. Masons son. That is a really good point. Say as early as sheridan is moving to the south, in the valley where he is trying to get his feet on the back on the ground after being put in charge and mosby is around, constantly harassing them. What people remember the most is it becomes much more disciplined , almost sort of mechanical destruction. You dont find those kinds of episodes later. I think that hunter wasted so ofh capital burning homes people who had ambivalent loyalties. Sheridan was in a rush. I dont have an opinion about whether he was a good guy or not. That bywhat joe said is refusing to destroy the Virginia Central reload, is that because i cannot for the life of me figure that out. It is inexplicable. There is no evidence that there was any serious opposition, and hes got an enormous force. Grant really wants him to come to charlottesville, and he does not do it. He just doesnt. There are no repercussions, none. The other side of the room. This is a breakthrough. Does back to a couple points. Isnt it really hard in the civil war to know how many troops your opponents have . I know sometimes the estimate them fairly accurately, but talking about overestimating or underestimating. Shouldnt that be considered should not be part for the course . Are talking about lee estimating union troops . Lee, mcclellan, sheridan. You should be closer than a factor of three. The have a very good sense of one another by this point in the war. The United States has excellent intelligence about the size of Confederate Forces in virginia. There are spies all over the place. I think it is unusual. We can disagree about a lot of things. Remember, in 1862, mcclellan this Confederate Army of monumental proportions and lincoln kept in order of battle based on richmond newspapers. He knew how many regiments they had and he assumed they would have the regiments would be no stronger than the union regiments. They knew the structure, and you know roughly how many are going to be sick and so forth. They will be affected by the same problems as the union army. Technically they will be worse because they are country kids and the northern kids are city kids, so theyve already been exposed to the measles, mumps, that sort of thing. Lincoln had a pretty accurate assessment of the size of wiis armie. He could not get his commanders to buy into it lees army. He cannot get his commanders to buy into it. Troops had been there earlier in the valley, and to a underestimate by that factor just seems striking to me. I do think you are bringing up some important things for us to remember. One time a National Historian said one walkietalkie or two, actually. [laughter] would have changed virtually every battle, if you had some idea of where they were. Partly as ahis neophyte. Im taking that it was really hard to do this and im just not willing to pass judgment. I assume they are doing the best they can do the information they have. Striking when you read at the time, how dark and murky everything they are doing is. Youooks a lot clearer if just reason just read the newspapers after the fact, but in the moment, it is really hard. We were talking about this during one of the breaks. If you read the congratulatory order after the battle of gettysburg, written by Daniel Butterfield and you dont have , he statesl of need we defeated a superior enemy force at gettysburg. The union army is still operating under the delusion that lees army has more men at gettysburg than the union army. And yet in the wake of chancellorsville, the coverage of chancellorsville in northern papers and among officers is very well aware of the fact that the army of Northern Virginia had about was outnumbered more than two to one. They knew the army was much reduced and they find it even more astonishing that booker would lose in the face of such a smaller. It is whatever you want the army of Northern Virginia to be for victory purposes. Have we warn you out . It has been a long march. Would you like to come and say goodbye . [laughter] i will do it from sitting here. On behalf of the people in special collections to allow us to hunker down here. I want to thank you very much for coming out, today. Many of you have been here all day. You made your way here and we are grateful for you to year hopeful to you for your presence and we hope youll keep an eye on our website and our facebook to figure out what we are doing in the future. 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