Disunion! Civil War is Proclaimed! (1 Viewer)

[jazzeum]

Caught Out of Time

A look at the Slave Narrative Project, a program dedicated to recording in print and recordings the voices of former slaves. The Slave Narrative Project was created by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal Era. The Slave Narrative Project consisted of approximately 2,000 interviews from over 17 states. Only 27 interviews of this vast collection were tape recorded, and of those, only a handful specifically recall the Civil War. There are many other non-audio records of slaves’ memories of the conflict.

One former slave, Fountain Hughes, who was descended from Elizabeth Hemmings of Monticello, is heard to say, among other things, that he would rather shoot himself than go back to slavery where "you are nothing but a dog." He also decries the Yankees throwing flour into the river.


Julia Ann Jackson, age 102. Her photo was taken as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives collections


Fountain Hughes, a former slave whose voice was recorded by the Slave Narrative Project

Although the Slave Narrative Project had a few drawbacks -- almost all the interviewers were white, many white Southeners were opposed to the project and some of the more damming recollections were censored -- there are glittering moments of candor in these narratives, and the effect of hearing rather than seeing or reading is a heightened contact with history.

As the author of the piece recounts, there is a priceless intimacy to tuning into the cadence and tone of someone recounting childhood memories punctuated by overseers and Yankees, surreptitious mistresses and cannon shots in the distance. Alice Gaston recalls the Federal army arriving on her plantation: “I can remember when the Yankees come through and they carried my father … Missus told me not say anything. They all hiding in the woods and I didn’t tell them anything.” Samuel Polite, speaking in Gullah dialect in St. Helena Island, SC, remembers his cruel overseer — “the devil” — making his mother plow, and Northern troops telling him to run away: “The Yankees come across on the old Giddy Main. They tell us to run away up in Bonrad.”

These narratives are as poetic as they are complex, tendentious and subtle; they spotlight the voices of those who had the most at stake in the war and lived to see it from the longest view.

The full article can be accessed here.

Note: the article contains several links to the tales of former slaves recorded by the Slave Narrative Project.

 

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Washington's Black Codes

December 4, 1861. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts delivers a speech complaining about the conditions in the Washington jail and the African-American prisoners held within it. Some were jailed under the black codes that restricted the lives and livelihoods of free Blacks. Abolitionists had long decried the jail and Washington’s entire law enforcement system as examples of slaveholders’ grip on the federal government. An 1836 broadside called the capital city the “Slave Market of America” and attacked the jail as a seat of injustice, where free blacks were sold into slavery and slaves, unclaimed by their owners, might languish for months or years.


“Secrets of the Prison House,” a depiction of the Washington jail from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Dec. 28, 1861

For years pro-slavery Congressment had fought against encroachments against slavery in Washington. However, now that most of these men were gone, the anti-slavery Congressmen pushed forward proposals to reform local law to eliminate these codes.

In the end the debate to eliminate these codes and afford Blacks civil rights that whites were accustomed to was subordinated to the question of slavery. However, the issue would not be forgotten and following the end of slavery in Washington in April 1862, Wilson pushed for a system of education for black children in the District, which was signed by the President into law in May 1862.

What took place in Washington foreshadowed the debate over emancipation and civil rights that would engage the country as the war progressed and reconstruction beckoned.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Compassion Under Fire

A brief look at Clara Barton, who started the War as a clerk in the Patent Office but ended the War as a Civil War nurse who later founded the American Red Cross. Although Clara Barton is known in history as a nurse who tended to the wounded and prepared meals for hundreds of patients, one of her lasting contributions was traveling to Andersonville and identifying the human remains and honoring the dead with military burials (a job that Secretary of War Stanton asked her to see through).


Clara Barton, in a photograph attributed to Matthew Brady

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Picket Lines

November 30, 1861. Harper’s Weekly features a poem destined to become one of the essential texts of the Civil War, Ethel Lynn Beers’s “The Picket-Guard.” Beers, a 34-year-old native of Goshen, N.Y., said later that she wrote her only famous work in a single morning, after a boardinghouse breakfast at which one of her fellow residents relayed a newspaper report of “all quiet along the Potomac, as usual.” Beers had answered by reading aloud the sub-headline, “except a poor picket shot.”

The poem became a hit and was set to music by a leading southern composer as well as several northerners, the text became immensely popular on both sides under the title “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight.” It was one of the wartime lyrics most often republished and most frequently mentioned in private correspondence. Moreover, the poem did not indicate whether the sentry was a Northerner or Southener.


Three picket guards along the Potomac River

Here is a link to the poem.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

Birthday of a Nation

December 24, 1861. Charleston, South Carolina celebrates the first annivesary of secession. The Charleston, S.C. Courier gave an impassioned account of the first anniversary of secession, as it was celebrated in the true birthplace of the Confederacy. “The Confederate and State Flags floated over the Custom House, the Old Exchange – which connects Charleston of this day with the Charleston of Colonial history, and with the names and services of LAURENS, GADSDEN, PINCKNEY, and their compeers of 1776.”

Following its secession from the Union, South Carolina sent commissioners to spread the gospel, which, apparently, was spread successfully. By December 1861, the Confederacy had won a surprising and decisive victory at Bull Run.


Jefferson Davis, the “first president of the new Confederacy,” featured on an 1861 cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly

However, there were certain ominous signs as well. The Union blockade had begun in earnest that July. The Confederate guns at Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard had been silenced and Union troops occupied Port Royal, South Carolina and the Sea Islands. The Courier admitted to certain setbacks, most recently rooted in rumors of slave insurrection and arson following the early December fires in Charleston. But even in the city’s air of “smoke … disaster and conflagration,” South Carolinians were offering “cheerful faces beaming forth unchanged and unchangeable resolution.”

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Scapegoat of Ball's Bluff

In late 1861, congressional critics of Lincoln's wartime policy established the the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, designed to examine every aspect of the war effort and empowered to “send for person and papers” as needed. Far from being a dispassionate check on the Executive Branch, however, the committee was, from the very beginning, a tool for partisan politics, a weapon forged out of, in Senator Charles Sumner’s words, “a strong desire to hold someone responsible” for the Union Army’s recent misfortunes.

One of their first victims was Brigadier General Charles Pomeroy Stone, the Union commander at Ball's Bluff, and an 1845 West Point graduate who oversaw Lincoln's inaugural. The accusations against General Stone revolved around the disastrous loss at Ball's Bluff some months earlier, where Colonel Edward Baker, a former Senator from Oregon and friend of Lincoln's, was killed.


Brig. Gen. Charles Stone and his daughter Hettie

Stone appears to have been caught in a perfect storm of political intrigue. The ascendance of the Radical Republicans, their growing disgust with George McClellan, their distrust of the general’s Democratic politics, a feeling among some that many West Point graduates were Southern sympathizers, and lingering doubts about Lincoln’s capacity as a wartime leader combined to create an atmosphere rife with presumptions of treason. The radicals found in Stone a means of striking at McClellan, Stone’s immediate superior and friend.

Ultimately, Stone was arrested but it took almost six months to get him released. The Committee eventually exonerated him but the damage was done: his career was effectively over, a victim of political intrigue and the hunt for scapegoats then enveloping Washington.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Sherman's Southern Sympathies

William Tecumseh Sherman is viewed as no friend of the South but Sherman views about slavery echoed those of many in the South. This shouldn't be surprising since he had spent much of his life among Southeners. Many of his postings before the Civil War were in the Deep South and in 1859 became head of the Louisiana Military Academy. As with many of his time, Sherman's beliefs were pro slavery and anti black. In 1860 Sherman wrote to his wife that the two races couldn't live in harmony and joked about becoming a slave master.


William Tecumseh Sherman

However, he did worry that the political fight over slavery would rend the Union although he displayed a clear sympathy for the Southern position. In January 1861 his concern for the longevity of the Union led him to resign his superintendency of the Academy when it became clear that Louisiana would secede from the Union.

Sherman would seek revenge for what he considered Confederate treason: "My aim,” according to his memoirs, “was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.” However, Sherman was said to be troubled by fighting "some of the families in whose houses I used to spend some happy days" and was relieved whenever battle against them could be avoided.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Lincoln's Audacious Plan to End Slavery

In late 1861 Lincoln began to develop a plan commonly known as compensated emancipation. He would start with Delaware and the federal government would buy out Delaware's entire slave population. He drafted legislation that would be introduced into the Delaware House of Representatives.

The plan would have outlawed slavery in Delaware provided that the U.S. Congress would have authorized the payment to slaveholders of interest bearing bonds. He persuaded two friends of the administration who were also the state's largest slaveholders, Congressmen George P. Fisher and Benjamin Burton, to sponsor the legislation. He selected Delaware because it had the fewest slaves (1,800) of any of the border states.


Congressman George P. Fisher

Ultimately, in Febuary 1862, his plan was rejected by Delaware by one vote. However, Lincoln did not just have Delaware in mind but hoped to have compensated emancipation for the border states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri) approved by the Congress. Lincoln's belief was that if the border states accepted his proposal, the rebellion would come to an end. Although the Congress passed it over Democratic opposition (with little help from the border states), the slave-holders of those states declined the offer.

Suitably rejected, the President then began to think about what would become the Emancipation Proclamation.

The full article may be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

News of the Wired

Although the telegraph had been invented in 1844, as discussed in other entries, it had a great effect on the Civil War.

Lincoln was aware that the telegraph had great power as an instrument of both military and civilian communication. The telegraph had alerted him to his presidential victory in November. Yet when he took office in March, the telegraph extended only to the Navy Yard and the War Department, not the White House. For several months thereafter the administration had to use the city’s central telegraph office to send its dispatches. After the war began and McClellan became the Army's commander, the nerve center of the war was in his headquarters from which all war news emanated. Lincoln found this unacceptable and he transferred control to the War Department.

By the middle of 1862 Lincoln began to use the telegraph as a means to project his authority in both the eastern and western theaters. The telegraph office became his second home, where he spent more time than any other place outside the Executive Mansion, including many long nights waiting for unfiltered messages from the battle front.


Lincoln at the Telegraph Office

The telegraph may have had its biggest influence though in the reporting of war news by the newspapers. In the late 1840s, the establishment of the New York Associated Press made it possible for member newspapers to share the costs of the new technology in order to gather news. By the early 1850s, content from the A.P. comprised at least two columns of every major daily newspaper, and many readers considered this “telegraphic news” to be the most compelling and urgent part of the paper.

By 1860 the A.P. was distributing its news not just in New York but around the country, and this practice began to transform the very meaning of news. Local papers now had the capacity to report national events to their readers in a timely manner, so that “the news” gradually came to connote not just events, but events happening at almost that very moment.

War news led to a frenzy for more information. Circulation of NY papers rose by more than 40 percent during the war, and in other areas of the nation by as much as 63 percent. During a major battle, editors could expect to sell up to five times as many copies of their papers.

The A.P. came to dominate wire news, of which the President was not unmindful: The A.P. had regular access to the president and the War Department, and was given exclusive bulletins and announcements to disseminate to the papers. In exchange, the A.P. gave the administration a way to reach the public in a manner that could be carefully controlled and rapidly disseminated.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

Lost Again

A discussion of the colony established for escaped slaves on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Like the Lost Colony of Elizabethan times, it was jinxed from the start. The Civil War Colony was made possible by the seizure of Roanoke Island by an expeditionary force under Gen. Ambrose Burnside on February 7, 1862. Burnside’s success in taking Roanoke was greatly assisted by intelligence from a slave.


The Burnside expedition landing on the southern end of Roanoke Island

According to the author of the piece, Gregory Downs: "Despite the United States’ overwhelming numerical superiority, the island could not be easily captured. Its eastern side was too shallow to approach, the western too well-guarded by Confederate batteries. A runaway slave, a teenager named Tom, provided United States officers with a plan. South of the Confederate forts, he told them, was a farm with a protected harbor. They could land there with relative ease, then make their way up the island."

Federal forces turned Roanoke Island into a refuge for North Carolina slaves that fled into Union-controlled territory. Downs writes: "A “party of fifteen or twenty of these loyal blacks, men, women and children, arrived on a ‘Dingy,’ ” one officer said later. Slaves arrived from the mainland in larger and larger numbers, 100 within the first month, and 250 by early April, spurred by rumors that they would soon be free."

Yet Roanoke proved a poor place for a slave refuge.

The colony faced enormous challenges. It was not lush farmland. A Northern reporter described it as “a miserable place, being nothing but an inner sandbank, ornamented with stunted trees, scrubwood and tangled brushwood.” The people’s needs vastly outstripped the colony’s supplies.

Yet, according to Gregory P. Downs, the problem was not just the Roanoke Island’s poor soil and federal authorities that overloaded it with escaped slaves. The federal commissioner for the island was an ideologue determined to prove that the Roanoke Colony could be self-supporting, even if the freed people suffered and died in the process. African-American refugees on Roanoke often went hungry and lacked other necessities such as clothing and shoes. They survived pitifully on what crops they could grow, the rations the Commissioner deigned to provide, and the charity obtained from missionaries that worked on the island and from other more distant benefactors. When the war ended, the Commissioner cut off the federal rations entirely and the colony dissolved when President Andrew Johnson pardoned ex-Confederates and restored their prewar property to them.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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Been Workin' on the Railroad

At the time of the start of the Civil War slavery was not just an agricultural institution in the mid-nineteenth century South was not exclusively so. Slaves were increasingly used for a variety of non-agricultural uses, including laboring on railroads.


African-American laborers destroying rail lines

Unsurprisingly, during the Civil War these railroads became highways to freedom both for the slaves that worked on them and other African Americans.

In April 1862, with Union forces outside Fredericksburg, Va., A small group of slaves escaped their camp and struck out for the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad. They followed it north toward Fredericksburg, at one point meeting the road master who had hired them. Claiming to be on the job, they made their way along the railroad and then through to the Union lines, where they encountered the Sixth Wisconsin, a unit later made famous for its toughness on the battlefield.

Many slaves used the lines cut by railroads to escape. The R. F. & P. and the Virginia Central Railroad connected some of the wealthiest slaveholding counties in Virginia. Nearly 80,000 enslaved people lived in the surrounding counties, almost a fifth of Virginia’s total slave population. This north-south axis, running from Richmond to Washington, became an avenue of freedom: tens of thousands of blacks used the railroad to guide them north to Union lines.

In August 1862, when the Union forces retreated back up the line toward Washington, black families went with them. Col. W.W. Wright, the engineer and superintendent of the United States Military Railroads, witnessed the evacuation: “The contrabands fairly swarmed about the Fredericksburg and Falmouth stations, and there was a continuous black line of men, women and children moving north along the [rail] road, carrying all their worldly goods on their heads. Every train running to Aquia was crowded with them.” According to Wright, well over 10,000 contrabands walked or rode on the tracks north toward freedom in one week.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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The Confederate Territory of Arizona

February 14, 1862. The Confederate States of America signed the territory of Arizona into the CSA as as their westernmost capital.

The duration of this outpost would be shortlived: in the summer of 1862, Union forces from California sent the rebels fleeing from Tucson and Sylvester Mowry, a Repulican from Rhode Island, who sided with the rebel forces, would be imprisoned.

Arizona was signed into existence as a territory of the United States by President Lincoln on February 24, 1863.

The full article, including a description of the brave act of one Mexican American immigrant sticking up for the Union, can be accessed here.

 

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Unconditional Surrender

February 16, 1862. The duty of surrendering Fort Donelson (along the Cumberland River) to Ulysses S. Grant becomes the burden of General Simon Bolivar Buckner, after Generals John Floyd and Gideon Pillow pass the baton of surrender.


The Battle of Fort Donelson, February 16, 1862

Buckner hoped to secure reasonable terms from Grant, whose legendary remark was: "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works."

Having no option but to accept, Buckner surrenders what was, up to that time, the greatest military surrender in U.S. history: 12,000 men. The cities of Clarksville and Nashville in Tennessee now lay open for invasion and capture.

The upshot of this battle for both the North and South was that it cemented Grant's reputation in the Western Theatre, opened up Memphis for capture, demonstrated the effectiveness of the Union Navy on the South's river network and removed 12,000 soldiers from the field, soldiers who the South could have used at the Battle of Shiloh.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

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February 15, 1862. Louisiana dissolves all its militia units as part of a military reorganization law. Among the organizations disbanded was a militia unique in the Confederacy, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, a French speaking gens de colour libre, or free people of color, the only black militia regiment in the Confederacy.


Members of the (Union) First Louisiana Native Guard, in 1863

Despite a long traditional of black military service in Louisiana, the free people of color (descendants of European men and women of African descent), were not welcome in Louisiana because of their African heritage. The 1st Louisiana Native Guards encountered resistance from the Louisiana government but persisted because, as they told General Benjamin Butler (when he was the military commander in New Orleans after the Union captured the city), they wanted to tamp down any suspicion disloyalty during the war hysteria of spring 1861.

The unit would be eventually dissolved but then reinstated when Union forces threatened New Orleans. However, they were not given a substantial role in defending the city. When the Confederate forces finally left in April 1862, the unit was once again disbanded.

The unit's name would be taken by a Union regiment raised in New Orleans, with some of the same men who had previously served the Confederacy.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[jazzeum]

The Nanny Diaries

February 16, 1862. Nannie Haskins, a 16-year-old native of Clarksville, Tenn., was anxiously awaiting news of the Battle of Fort Donelson, just a few dozen miles downriver. Like her neighbors, Nannie knew that if Fort Donelson, which guarded the Cumberland near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and Fort Henry, which did the same along the nearby Tennessee River, were to fall, the entire Confederacy would suddenly be at grave risk. Grant’s troops soon captured Clarksville, and soon after Nashville, less than 50 miles away. For the rest of the war it remained occupied by federal troops.


Nannie Haskins (front row, left) and her sisters.

Nannie Haskins’ diary gives insight into Clarksville’s daily life. Her entries mix information about battles, wounded neighbors, guerrilla warfare and violence along with descriptions of domestic life, school assignments, social events and scores of local people struggling to maintain their lives as best they could in the midst of Civil War.

The Haskins house overlooked the Cumberland River. At dusk on May 12, 1863, Nannie wrote, “Those hateful gun boats! They look like they are from the lower regions. Now this the second night that four of them have been anchored in the river opposite our house. I know they are frightened, they have placed their gunboats so that if an attack is made, they can shell the town. Poor cowards, I can just turn my head now and see them crawling about on the boats like so many snakes.”

Nannie's diaries are apparently replete with observations about daily life, a life under occupation of Union forces. "Never see a Yankee but what I roll my eyes, grit my teeth, and almost shake my fist at them, and then bit my lip involuntarily and turn away in disgust — God save us!”

This article was written by a Minoa Uffelman, a Professor of History at Austin Peay University in Tennessee, who is an editor of the forthcoming diaries of Ms. Haskins.

The article can be accessed here.

 

[Louis Badolato]

The Nanny Diaries

February 16, 1862. Nannie Haskins, a 16-year-old native of Clarksville, Tenn., was anxiously awaiting news of the Battle of Fort Donelson, just a few dozen miles downriver. Like her neighbors, Nannie knew that if Fort Donelson, which guarded the Cumberland near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and Fort Henry, which did the same along the nearby Tennessee River, were to fall, the entire Confederacy would suddenly be at grave risk. Grant’s troops soon captured Clarksville, and soon after Nashville, less than 50 miles away. For the rest of the war it remained occupied by federal troops.

View attachment 86897
Nannie Haskins (front row, left) and her sisters.

Nannie Haskins’ diary gives insight into Clarksville’s daily life. Her entries mix information about battles, wounded neighbors, guerrilla warfare and violence along with descriptions of domestic life, school assignments, social events and scores of local people struggling to maintain their lives as best they could in the midst of Civil War.

The Haskins house overlooked the Cumberland River. At dusk on May 12, 1863, Nannie wrote, “Those hateful gun boats! They look like they are from the lower regions. Now this the second night that four of them have been anchored in the river opposite our house. I know they are frightened, they have placed their gunboats so that if an attack is made, they can shell the town. Poor cowards, I can just turn my head now and see them crawling about on the boats like so many snakes.”

Nannie's diaries are apparently replete with observations about daily life, a life under occupation of Union forces. "Never see a Yankee but what I roll my eyes, grit my teeth, and almost shake my fist at them, and then bit my lip involuntarily and turn away in disgust — God save us!”

This article was written by a Minoa Uffelman, a Professor of History at Austin Peay University in Tennessee, who is an editor of the forthcoming diaries of Ms. Haskins.

The article can be accessed here.

Just an observation, but there really did not seem to be a lot of respect or common ground on the part of the civilians on both sides of the U.S. Civil War for the troops on the other side . . . while it seems like there was at least some respect, if not comraderie, among the opposing troops.

 

[Kaap]

I somewhat often wondered how life would have been for southern civilians in captured cities. Did they get put under pressure from Union soldiers. Plundering, rape, things like that.

 

[UKReb]

Louis

I tend to agree in general with your observation-MG Benjamin Butler during his occupation of New Orleans in April '62 was forced to issue his "woman's order" because of the daily abuse his soldiers endured from patriotic Confederate woman. His initial indignation grew to fury when Southern women jeered and threw mud at a funeral procession of one of his young Federal officers. His General Orders 28 was issued stating that in future all women who abused Old Glory or any of his officers or men would be treated as "undesirable ladies". That earned him the nickname of The Beast but it quelled the fervour of the New Orleans ladies.

Plunder and pillage are the handmaidens of war, although never officially condoned by either army, certainly in many instances commanders turned a blind eye toward these activities. The South took the brunt of this in Tennessee/Louisiana/Virginia and of course Sherman's march to the sea so it is little wonder that civilians had little time for the invaders. However, there were many humanitarian acts carried out by civilians in the South and the North in particular to wounded soldiers. A particularly fine book highlighting some of these acts of mercy is When The Smoke Cleared At Gettysburg by George Sheldon.

Before the townspeople could rebuild their destroyed town they faced the enormous problem of burying 7000 battlefield dead and caring for 20000 wounded men from both army's. One can learn a lot about the battle- which is overlooked in most of the Gettysburg tomes- of how ordinary people acted and reacted when they were pulled into the war and how they did not differentiate between the wounded who wore the blue or the wounded who wore the gray.

Bob

 

[jazzeum]

Blood and Sand

February 21, 1862. The Battle of Valverde rages in the sandy, cottonwood flood plain of the Rio Grande in the New Mexico Territory. Just six miles north of the Union post at Fort Craig, hundreds of dead men, horses and mules litter the battlefield as a furious artillery duel and infantry charges stretch on into the late afternoon. At 4 p.m., the Union commander, Col. Edward Canby, decides to make his move and finish the rebel forces, led by Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley.


Maj. Gen. Edward R.S. Canby


Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley

While the Union commander orders companies on his right to attack the Confederate left, he inadvertently weakens his own center and left. Although a rebel assault on the right is repulsed, the ensuing counterattack on the left breajs through, capturing the Union’s artillery and breaking Canby’s already cautious will.

The Confederates achieved a Pyrrhic victory: Sibley won on the battlefield, but his dreams of breaking through the Union lines and capturing vast stretches of the American Southwest was doomed.

Sibley, with the approval of President Jefferson Davis, had been marching west in a bold attempt not just to invade the arid, sparsely populated Southwest – but to capture California’s gold and ports. Davis and Sibley believed the campaign would shift the entire balance of the war. The Union would be denied Californian gold even as Confederate coffers would fill. With ports in the Pacific, the Confederacy could send its cotton to foreign markets, avoiding the Union blockade along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

After the victory Sibley was cut off from his resupply from Texas. His forces resumed their march north, a stab at Santa Fe their only hope. As they pressed onward, Canby sent some of his men to harass the Confederates. Success would not be Sibley's as his troops plunged north, not west into a bitter New Mexico winter instead of the warm California climate.

The full article can be accessed here.

 

[Dragoon]

Was driving through a very quiet and lonely stretch of New Mexico a few years ago and had to pull over to answer ''nature's call''. I noticed what looked to be a stone monument about 50 yards from the road - a rather peculiar sight in the N. Mex. high desert. Had to see what it was, so I jumped a wire fence and wove a path through the desert scrub. It turned out to be a somewhat forgotten monument erected at the beginning of the last century by the Daughters of thne Confereracy honoring the Southern victory of the Battle of Valverde.