One small section of Virginia became America's bloodiest battle ground. In an area of barely 20 square miles and including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, more than half a million men fought in deadly combat.
Here, more men were killed and wounded during the War for Southern Independence than were killed and wounded in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the War with Mexico and all of the Indian wars combined. No fewer than 19 generals, ten Union and nine Confederate, met their deaths here.
Photo: Confederate troops viewed from a distance of one mile, on the opposite side of a destroyed bridge in Fredericksburg, Virginia, by Union photographer Mathew Brady
In 1861, when they perceived their rights to be threatened, when those who would alter the nature of the government of their fathers were placed in charge, when threatened with change they could not accept, the mighty men of valor began to gather. A band of brothers, native to the Southern soil, they pledged themselves to a cause: the cause of defending family, fireside, and faith. Between the desolation of war and their homes they interposed their bodies and they chose me for their symbol.
I Am Their Flag.
Their mothers, wives, and sweethearts took scissors and thimbles, needles and thread, and from silk or cotton or calico - whatever was the best they had - even from the fabric of their wedding dresses, they cut my pieces and stitched my seams.
I Am Their Flag.
On courthouse lawns, in picnic groves, at train stations across the South the men mustered and the women placed me in their hands. "Fight hard, win if possible, come back if you can; but, above all, maintain your honor. Here is your symbol," they said.
I Am Their Flag.
They flocked to the training grounds and the drill fields. They felt the wrenching sadness of leaving home. They endured sickness, loneliness, boredom, bad food, and poor quarters. They looked to me for inspiration.
I Am Their Flag.
I was at Sumter when they began in jubilation. I was at Big Bethel when the infantry fired its first volley. I smelled the gun smoke along Bull Run in Virginia and at Belmont along the Mississippi. I was in the debacle at Fort Donelson; I led Jackson up the Valley. For Seven Days I flapped in the turgid air of the James River bottoms as McClellan ran from before Richmond. Sidney Johnston died for me at Shiloh as would thousands of others whose graves are marked "Sine Nomine," - without a name - unknown.
I Am Their Flag.
With ammunition gone they defended me along the railroad bed at Manassas by throwing rocks. I saw the fields run red with blood at Sharpsburg. Brave men carried me across Doctor's Creek at Perryville. I saw the blue bodies cover Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg and the Gray ones fall like leaves in the Round Forest at Stones River.
I Am Their Flag.
I was a shroud for the body of Stonewall after Chancellorsville. Men ate rats and mule meat to keep me flying over Vicksburg. I tramped across the wheat field with Kemper and Armistead and Garnett at Gettysburg. I know the thrill of victory, the misery of defeat, the bloody cost of both.
I Am Their Flag.
When Longstreet broke the line at Chickamauga, I was in the lead. I was the last off Lookout Mountain. Men died to rescue me at Missionary Ridge. I was singed by the wildfire that burned to death the wounded in the Wilderness. I was shot to tatters in the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania. I was in it all from Dalton to Peachtree Creek, and no worse place did I ever see than Kennesaw and New Hope Church. They planted me over the trenches at Petersburg and there I stayed for many long months.
I Am Their Flag.
I was rolled in blood at Franklin; I was stiff with ice at Nashville. Many good men bade me farewell at Sayler's Creek. When the end came at Appomattox, when the last Johnny Reb left Durham Station, many of them carried fragments of my fabric hidden on their bodies.
I Am Their Flag.
In the hard years of so-called "Reconstruction," in the difficulty and despair of years that slowly passed, the veterans, their wives and sons and daughters, they loved me. They kept alive the tales of valor and the legends of bravery. They passed them on to the grandchildren and they to their children, and so they were passed to you.
I Am Their Flag.
I have shrouded the bodies of heroes, I have been laved with the blood of martyrs, I am enshrined in the hearts of millions, living and dead. Salute me with affection and reverence. Keep undying devotion in your hearts. I am history. I am heritage, not hate. I am the inspiration of valor from the past. I Am Their Flag. By Dr. Micheal Bradley
Confederate Brigadier General. Adam Johnson was born on February 8, 1834, in Henderson, Kentucky.
He was well respected for his bravado, once capturing the town of Newburgh, Indiana from a large Union unit with only twelve men and a length of stovepipe mounted to a wagon. The Union soldiers, fearing the "cannon" surrendered, and Stovepipe Johnson acquired his nickname.
His service was cut short, during a dawn attack on the Union camp at Grubbs Crossroads, Johnson was accidentally shot in the face by his own men; he was then captured and imprisoned at Fort Warren until the end of the War. After the armistice, he was released and returned to Texas, now totally blind, but his drive never diminished. He founded the town of Marble Falls and the Texas Mining Improvement Company; wrote his memoirs The Partisan Rangers of the Confederate States Army and continued his pre-war work with Overland Mail until his death on October 23, 1922. He was honored by having his funeral services held in the Texas Senate chamber and was laid to rest in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
Johnson started working at the age of twelve in a drugstore, leaving his job in 1854 to move to Burnet County, Texas to work as a surveyor. He married Josephine Eastland in January of 1861 and gained a reputation as an expert Indian fighter and stagecoach driver for Butterfield Overland Mail. When the War broke out, he returned to his home state of Kentucky in 1861 and enlisted in Nathan Bedford Forrest's company as a scout; his skill in the military being such that he was given command of the Texas Partisan Rangers and promoted to colonel by June, 1864.
Speaking to Mrs. Fremont the President went on almost angrily…“the General should never have dragged the Negro into the War. It is a war for a great national object and the Negro has nothing to do with it.”
Oh really, why aren’t they teaching that in schools? (because they have an agenda).
This was spoken to Mrs. Fremont when she came to the White House to petition on behalf of her husband whom Lincoln relieved of command for emancipating slaves in his military district of Missouri.
In another meeting Mrs. Fremont countered, telling the President that he (Lincoln) neither understood the complex situation in Missouri nor that the war had to become one of emancipation TO PREVENT EUROPEAN POWERS FROM SIDING WITH THE CONFEDERACY.
It was a war for independence, just like the first one…
A British observer, Captain Fremantle, witnessed a black Confederate soldier leading a captured Union soldier down the street, in an occupied union town. He made the following observation:
"This little episode, of a Southern slave leading a white Yankee soldier through a Northern village, alone and on his own accord, would not have been gratifying to an abolitionist, nor would the sympathizers both in England and in the North feel encouraged, if they could hear the language of detestation and contempt with which the numerous Negroes, with Southern armies, speak of their [Northern] liberators."
On April 25, 1861 over three hundred free Blacks, and a few slaves "volunteered" by their owners, left Petersburg by train for labor service on the fortifications of Norfolk with their own Confederate flag, and leader."
"We are willing to aid Virginia's cause to the utmost of our ability. There is not an unwilling heart among us, not a hand but will tell in the work before us, and we promise unhesitating obedience to all orders that may be given us."
-- Charles Tinsley, Free Black, Pocahontas, Petersburg, Va.
"Realizing that many free Black households would be in want following the departure of their husbands on voluntary work, the Petersburg City Council voted family assistance funds for wives and children left behind. Such assistance continued for the length of the war."
Mayor Dodson presented them with a Confederate flag and promised the men that they would "...reap a rich reward of praise and merit from a thankful people.
On 11 June 1863, a full year before Sherman's Atlanta campaign, Federal troops stationed on St. Simons Island looted and then burned the Georgia coastal town of Darien, including the homes of the black residents/slaves. The destruction of this undefended city, which was of little strategic importance, was carried out by units under Colonel James Montgomery including 54th Massachusetts Volunteers under the command of a reluctant Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
Colonel Montgomery was a staunch abolitionist who brought his unconventional jayhawk type warfare to Georgia from Kansas where he had previously campaigned. Noted historian Albert Castel describes Montgomery as "a sincere, if unscrupulous, antislavery zealot." Montgomery ordered that the town be looted and then burned and his troops broke ranks and looted freely, while Shaw ordered his to take only that which would be useful at camp.
The First African Baptist Church (the oldest African-American church in the county) was destroyed along with the rest of the town. Col Shaw later called his action satanic and was ashamed of his troop's participation in the needless act of destruction. Following the Civil War, Darien was rebuilt, with financial aid coming in small part from the family of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who had been killed during the War but had written of his shame in participating in the destruction.
Via Georgia Civil War Commission
