Ghost Soldier (21 page)
Authors: Elaine Marie Alphin
The attack on Fort Stedman was a real battle in the nine-month siege of Petersburg that ended the Civil War or, as many Southerners call it, the War Between the States. Richeson Francis Chamblee is a fictional character, similar to many underage Southern teens who volunteered in the last desperate months of the war.
In an effort to wear down General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, General Grant's Union Army assaulted the city of Petersburg in the summer of 1864. Confederate President Jefferson Davis refused to leave his capital in Richmond, so Lee had no choice but to defend Petersburg in order to protect the railroad to Richmond. He had his soldiers dig trenches and construct earthworks to create a siege line defending the city. The Union Army responded with a series of attacks to the southwest, slowly encircling Petersburg and cutting the Southern railroads leading up to the city, thereby gradually starving the Southern troops and the people of Petersburg. By the spring of 1865, casualties from battle, starvation, and disease had taken such a toll that General Lee informed President Davis the Army would have to retreat.
In March 1865, General Gordon came up with a daring alternative. Gordon's men defended a part of the Southern line called Colquitt's Salient, which was very close to the Northern line. Like the Confederate Army, the Union soldiers had dug trenches and built earthen forts all along their line. But General Gordon's soldiers were so close to one fort, Fort Stedman, that he thought his men could move forward quietly in the night, launch a surprise attack, and seize the fort. Once done, Gordon believed he had a chance to attack other parts of the Union line from the rear, capture supplies, and perhaps even break the siege.
Gordon's plan worked, and his troops captured Fort Stedman just before dawn on March 25, 1865. But after that, things didn't go as planned. Northern soldiers at the other forts heard the fighting at Fort Stedman and sent thousands of reinforcements. When Gordon's men tried to continue their attack, they were overwhelmed by the Northern counter-attack and almost captured. General Gordon managed to get some of his men back to Colquitt's Salient because a regiment of North Carolina infantry held Fort Stedman against the Union counterattack until the very end. In that morning's fighting alone, the two armies combined suffered more than five thousand casualties.
After the failure to hold Fort Stedman and break the Union line, General Lee pulled his army out and let Petersburg fall to the Northern Army. General Grant pursued him to Appomattox, where Lee surrendered the remains of the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the war.
Some readers may find it difficult to understand how someone like Richeson, a teenager from a family that didn't even own slaves, could feel so strongly about fighting for the Confederacy. Although ending slavery was a major outcome of the War, it is a great simplification to say that the War was fought over slavery. The causes of the War were many and complex, involving political and economic concerns. For example, the federal government's primary income was from tariffs on imported goods. A greater Northern population represented more votes in Congress, and tariffs controlling international trade with Europe were enacted so as to protect growing Northern industry at the expense of the agrarian South.
The eleven Southern states that eventually seceded also maintained that the federal government was taking too much authority upon itself. They believed that individual states should determine policy for their citizens. They based this belief, which they called States' Rights, on the principles of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who united equal and sovereign states for their mutual protection and benefit. One of the rights some Southerners wanted upheld was certainly the right to own slaves, but even Southerners who found the idea of slavery repugnant supported States' Rights on issues such as tariffs, free trade, access to railroads, Atlantic shipping, and many others. Of the total number of Southern soldiers fighting in the War, fewer than one in nine came from a slave-owning householdâfewer than one in three Southern households owned even a single slave. By the end of the War, one of every two male Southerners old enough to fight had been either killed or maimedâcitizens don't make that level of sacrifice solely to allow wealthy plantation owners to profit from their slaves' labor.
Despite the willingness of Southern citizens to fight for their beliefs, the larger Union Armies consistently outnumbered the Confederate troops they faced. With its densely populated industrial cities, the Northern government had a larger population base to draw on and used conscription to draft laborers and newly arrived immigrants. The Union Army expected an easy victory, but early Confederate successes discouraged the North and brought favorable reaction from Europe. In order to inspire the North, and to prevent potential European intervention, President Lincoln used the abolition of slavery as a rallying cry. He raised this issue for the first time only at Gettysburg in 1863.
By 1864, Union generals revised their war plans. Knowing the large difference in population, General Grant developed a strategy of attrition: he would repeatedly attack General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, accepting huge, but replaceable, losses among his own soldiers in order to achieve smaller, but irreplaceable, losses in the Southern Army.
General Sherman took Grant's plan one step further. Unlike Union troops, who were issued uniforms and supplies, Southern soldiers wore uniforms made by their mothers or wives, and were supplied largely from home, from funds raised by donations, and from farms they passed. Therefore, General Sherman proposed destroying the supply base for the Southern troops by destroying their farms and homes. Known as Sherman's March, this attack on civilians first swept through Georgia, then up into South Carolina and North Carolina. General Sheridan did the same in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The generals vowed to leave behind them nothing but barren land. Sheridan even boasted that a crow flying over the Shenandoah “would have to bring his own provender.”
Northern soldiers burned farmhouses, barns, and crops, and killed or stole all livestock. To prevent any future fundraising for the Confederacy, they seized heirlooms and valuables, killing family members or slaves who resisted. They tore up the railroads to destroy transportation in the South. After pulling up the iron railroad tracks, the soldiers heated them in fires and twisted the metal around fruit trees, killing the trees and destroying the track.
Many of the Northern soldiers were brutal, and it's all too easy to think of them as villains for attacking civilians so ruthlessly. However, it might be more realistic to see the soldiers involved as men who were given shameful orders. Perhaps they could not justify the orders morally, and therefore degenerated into a mob mentality so they would not have to face up to their actions. Not since the Roman destruction of Carthage and Judea had any organized national army destroyed civilian homes and property like Sherman's and Sheridan's men. Confronted with this unmilitary invasion, it's easy to see how teenagers like Richeson volunteered near the end of the War, determined to protect their families and homes.
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I would like to thank my critique group in Bloomington, Indiana, for their patient help and encouragement through numerous critical readings of this book. I would especially like to thank my editor, Christy Ottaviano, for proposing I write a new War Between the States ghost story, for giving me the confidence to experiment with a new voice in this book, and for offering kind but firm guidance in focusing Alexander's story.
Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur B. Alphin (Ret.), for taking time off from his work to give me a military tour of the National Battlefield Park at Petersburg, for providing me with photographs of the battlefield and of Confederate soldiers, and for letting me practice loading and firing his antique musket. I am grateful for his insightful and technical readings of many versions of this manuscript. Beyond his tangible help on this book, I appreciate his faithful support of my writing through the years and his unyielding determination to stand fast against injustice. He is an enduring inspiration to me.
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Copyright © 2001 by Elaine Marie Alphin
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First Editionâ2001
eISBN 9781627796484
First eBook edition: April 2015
