Ball's Bluff: Charles Stone and Herman Melville

On this date in 1862, a Union brigadier general, Charles P. Stone, was arrested and put in prison, where he would remain for more than six months without any charges being filed. This injustice did much to make people of good will suspicious of  the politicians who brought it about following Stone's defeat at Ball's Bluff the preceding October. A small part of The Army of the Potomac fought there on the banks of the river after which the army was named.
The battle was the result of what was essentially a Union raid, and likely made McClellan an even more cautious general than he was already inclined to be. It has some similarities to another raid-battle conducted a couple of weeks later (Nov. 7, 1861) on an even more famous Civil War river, the Mississippi, where Grant generalled his first real fight at Belmont, Missouri. Unlike Ball's Bluff, Belmont was not a defeat, but it was not a victory, either. (However Grant, unlike Stone, was with his troops in battle.)
While Stone's treatment by scapegoat-seeking politicians was outrageous, that does not absolve either him or his superior, Major General George McClellan, of responsibility for the outcome of Ball's Bluff. They blamed a scapegoat of their own, Col. Edward Baker -- a politically inexpedient choice, since Baker was a) killed in the battle, b) a sitting US senator, and c) a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. McClellan also hung Stone out to dry, in part based on intelligence from Allen Pinkerton, a notoriously incompetent spy whose main claim to fame was inflating estimates of Confederate troop numbers (which increased McClellan's caution to an almost paralytic state).
Perhaps the focus belongs not on the squabbling leaders but the unheralded soldiers who lost their lives, which is where Herman Melville put it in his poem, Ball's Bluff: A Reverie:

One noonday, at my window in the town,
    I saw a sight — saddest that eyes can see —
    Young soldiers marching lustily
      Unto the wars,
With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry;
    While all the porches, walks, and doors
    Were rich with ladies cheering royally.
 
They moved like Juny morning on the wave,
    Their hearts were fresh as clover in its prime
    (It was the breezy summer time),
      Life throbbed so strong,
How should they dream that Death in rosy clime
  Would come to thin their shining throng?
Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.
Weeks passed; and at my window, leaving bed,
    By nights I mused, of easeful sleep bereft,
    On those brave boys (Ah War! thy theft);
      Some marching feet
Found pause at last by cliffs Potomac cleft;
    Wakeful I mused, while in the street
Far footfalls died away till none were left.

Local Histories

Saw this at McGeary's last night, in downtown Albany, NY. The Irish translates, Who never retreated from the clash of spears -- though it was bullets and shells with which the regiment's soldiers contended at Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg and many other engagements unto the 21st century.

McGeary's hosts Skip Parsons' Riverboat Jazz Band on the second Monday of the month. They make fine music, and the joint has good hospitality, ale and food. 

It is also located next door to the home of the teen-age Herman Melville (on the left in the photo below, while that's my wife in the doorway of McGeary's). Melville's family was of Scottish and Dutch heritage, with both of his grandfathers prominent in the American Revolution. He lived in Albany until the family fell on harder times and they had to move to nearby Lansingburgh. As an adult, he could not support his own family as a novelist or lecturer, nor as a Civil War poet, so in 1866 embarked on a 19-year career as a customs house clerk in New York City. As he approached retirement from there, he may have bumped into a more recent employee, Vladimir Krzyzanowski.

Casemates in Review

A layer of sod in the wall helped protect this barracks against cannon balls, according to one of the excellent guides I talked to Friday at Fort Stanwix National Monument in Rome, NY. It's a 1970s reconstruction of the Revolutionary War fort commanded by Col. Peter Gansevoort (who was grandfather to the writer Herman Melville). Fort Stanwix successfully resisted a British siege in August 1777, which contributed to the American victories 110 miles east at Saratoga in September and October. That northern campaign was the turning point of the war (and Benedict Arnold played a key role at both locations).

 I think the sod is why they call it a casemate:

Casemate also is the name of the publisher of my two nonfiction books. (The historical novel The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant is published by Square Circle Press.) Those two biographies, of James Montgomery and Gordon Granger, have received a good joint review by Ben Powers in ARGunners Magazine -- which I appreciate.

The patient wife and I stopped at Fort Stanwix on our way back from Syracuse, where she snapped my picture pontificating (not singing an operatic aria) to the Onondaga County Civil War Round Table.

My next scheduled speaking gig is Monday evening in Manhattan at the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York.

Krzyżanowski's Charge

The most famous bayonet charge on this date in 1863, the middle day of the Battle of Gettysburg, was from Little Round Top, on the southern, left flank of the Union line, when Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain led the out-of-ammunition 20th Maine to drive away their Confederate attackers.

But there was another one later in the day, after dark, at the other end of the Union Line on Cemetery Hill (where Lincoln, four months later, delivered the Gettysburg Address).

The previous day, July 1, the Union forces had been driven back and through Gettysburg. Among the units taking heavy casualties were the Second Brigade, consisting of five regiments commanded by Col. Vladimir Krzyzanowski, of the Third Division, commanded by another immigrant soldier, Major General Carl Schurz, of XI Corps (led by Maj. Gen. O.O. Howard). The brigade's total losses at Gettysburg were 698 killed, wounded or missing. Krzyzanowski himself was injured and knocked unconscious that first day when his horse was shot, but he stayed with his men.

The Confederate attacks on Cemetery and Culp's hills at the depleted north end of the Union line came late in the day of July 2, and the Louisiana Tigers brigade (in the division of Major General Jubal Early) did take the summit of East Cemetery Hill. But Schurz and Kryzanowski immediately led two of the regiments in the latter's brigade, the 58th and 119th New York, with fixed bayonets to retake the position, which they did with assistance from Col. Samuel Carroll's brigade of II Corps (dispatched by Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock). The 119th, led by Krzyzanowski, pursued the Confederates to the base of the hill, then lay down to allow Union artillery to fire over them.

By 1885, Krzyzanowski was working in the same US Customs house in lower Manhattan from which Herman Melville had recently retired, and he is a recurring character in The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant. (Schurz comes up as a subject of conversation and criticism -- for his turn against Reconstruction -- by Nadine Turchin.)