Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander

Fighting for the Confederacy

Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander

Fighting for the CONFEDERACY

The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander

Edited by Gary W. Gallagher

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill, London

© 1989 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alexander, Edward Porter, 1835-1910.

Fighting for the Confederacy : the personal recollections of

General Edward Porter Alexander / edited by Gary W. Gallagher.

p. cm.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8078-1848-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4722-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns.

2. Alexander, Edward Porter, 1835–1910. 3. United States—History—

Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives, Confederate.

4. Confederate States of America—History, Military.

I. Gallagher, Gary W. II. Title.

E470.A3725 1989

973.7’3013—dc19     88-37667

CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Manufactured in the United States of America

04 03 02 01    8 7 6 5

For my parents, William and Shirley Gray Gallagher,

whose influence on me has been far greater than they imagine—

and for my son, William Paul Gallagher,

who is a great joy in my life

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Editor’s Note

Chapter 1. Early Days

Chapter 2. First Manassas or Bull Run

Chapter 3. Fall & Winter after Bull Run

Chapter 4. Seven Days

Chapter 5. Second Manassas Campaign

Chapter 6. Sharpsburg Campaign

Chapter 7. The Fall of 1862

Chapter 8. The Battle of Fredericksburg

Chapter 9. Winter after Fredericksburg

Chapter 10. Battle of Chancellorsville

Chapter 11. The Gettysburg Campaign

Chapter 12. Chickamauga

Chapter 13. Chattanooga & Knoxville

Chapter 14. Spring of 1864

Chapter 15. Wilderness & Spottsylvania

Chapter 16. North Anna & Drury’s Bluff

Chapter 17. Totopotomoy & Cold Harbor

Chapter 18. Passage of James River

Chapter 19. Siege of Petersburg

Chapter 20. Fall of 1864

Chapter 21. Fall & Winter of 1864 & ’65

Chapter 22. Appomattox

Notes

Index

Figures

1. Hogshead and platform, 6

2. Hogs on sawpit timbers, 6

3. Projectile with hole through long axis, 17

4. Vicinity of First Manassas battlefield, 40

5. Strategic situation prior to First Manassas, 41

6. First issue Confederate flag, 63

7. Army of Northern Virginia battle flag, 63

8. Confederate flag with cross as union, 64

9. Confederate flag surrounded by stars, 64

10. Lt. Gen. James Longstreet late in life, 67

11. Peninsula of Virginia, 78

12. Battlefield at Seven Pines, 85

13. Battlefield at Mechanicsville, 95

14. Battlefield at Gaines’s Mill, 102

15. Terrain at White Oak Swamp, 109

16. Strategic situation on the Richmond-Petersburg front, 1862, 125

17. Virginia and Maryland, 129

18. Potomac River near Shepherdstown, 147

19. Battlefield at Sharpsburg, 150

20. Battlefield at Fredericksburg, 173

21. Battlefield at Gettysburg, 218

22. Battle of Gettysburg, 2 July 1863, 239

23. Battle of Gettysburg, 3 July 1863, 250

24. Vicinity of Chickamauga campaign, 289

25. Gen. John Bell Hood, 297

26. Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, 298

27. Gen. Braxton Bragg, 299

28. Vicinity of Chattanooga, 310

29. Vicinity of Hough’s Ferry, Tennessee, 314

30. Siege of Knoxville, 318

31. Vicinity of the Wilderness, 352

32. Battle of the Wilderness at dawn, 6 May 1864, 355

33. Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins, 361

34. Maj. Gen. Joseph Brevard Kershaw, 362

35. Lt. Gen. Richard Heron Anderson, 364

36. Vicinity of Spotsylvania Courthouse, 367

37. Maj. Gen. Stephen Dodson Ramseur, 382

38. Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson, 383

39. Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton, 384

40. North Anna lines, 391

41. Hanover Junction to Totopotomoy Creek, 396

42. Federal formation for assault at Cold Harbor, 401

43. Lt. Gen. Jubal Anderson Early, 402

44. Maj. Gen. John Brown Gordon, 403

45. Confederate horseshoe at Cold Harbor, 405

46. Cross section of works at Cold Harbor, 409

47. Approach to General Gregg’s headquarters at Cold Harbor, 411

48. Passage of the James River, 418

49. Original Confederate intrenchments at Petersburg, 427

50. Lines at Petersburg, including the Elliott Salient, 442

51. Confederate hand grenade, 444

52. Sap roller, 444

53. Cross section of Federal Mine at Petersburg, 449

54. Sketch of Confederate counter-mines at Petersburg, 451

55. Vicinity of Deep Bottom, Virginia, 453

56. Cross section of the Crater at Petersburg, 456

57. Explosion of the Mine at Petersburg, 457

58. Approach to the Crater from southeast of the mouth of the Mine, 457

59. The Battle of the Crater by Elder, 461

60. Confederate lines as reconstructed at the Crater, 464

61. Vicinity of Richmond, September 1864, 476

62. Petersburg intrenchments, 1864–65 (1), 480

63. Vicinity of Richmond, November 1864, 488

64. Petersburg intrenchments, 1864–65 (2), 490

65. North central Georgia, 495

66. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, 497

67. Battlefield at Franklin from General Cheatham’s headquarters, 499

68. Retreat to Appomattox, 523

69. With Fate against Them by Gilbert Gaul, 524

70. Capture of E well’s Corps, 6 April 1865, 529

71. Village of Appomattox Court House—McLean House on right, 535

72. Appomattox Courthouse, 539

73. The Surrender at Appomattox, 542

74. General Lee and Colonel Marshall leaving McLean House after surrender, 542

75. General Lee’s return to his lines after surrender, 543

76. McLean House, Appomattox Court House, 543

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Four years have passed since Robert K. Krick first showed me excerpts from Porter Alexander’s unpublished reminiscences and urged me to edit the whole work for publication. A cursory examination of portions of the manuscript revealed its importance, but I felt that Bob was the obvious person to do the editing. He pleaded other obligations, though I suspect the real problem was his reluctance, as a confirmed Jackson and Lee man, to spend several years working on a project associated with James Longstreet’s First Corps. Whatever Bob’s true motivation, I am thankful that he pressed me to undertake a task that proved to be an absolutely delightful experience. Bob also exhibited his usual generosity in supplying information about dozens of people identified in the notes.

In the course of editing Fighting for the Confederacy, I received help from many other generous people. Sue Alexander Butterfield and Alexander Porter Butterfield, granddaughter and great-great grandson of Porter Alexander, kindly granted permission for me to prepare an annotated edition of the manuscript. I especially remember a long telephone conversation during which Mrs. Butterfield recalled memories of visiting Grandfather Porter on Christmas holidays. On more than one occasion, Alexander P. Butterfield took time from a demanding naval career to answer my queries. Needless to say, without the cooperation of the Butterfields this book could not have been published.

Friends and colleagues responded to my many requests for assistance with uniform good humor. Barnes F. Lathrop and T. Michael Parrish spent many hours discussing editorial methods and problems. A. Wilson Greene and Warren W. Hassler, Jr., most unselfishly wielded their blue pencils on the introduction. Maury Klein, Alexander’s biographer, was steadfastly encouraging and helpful. Thomas W. Broadfoot, Michael Owens, Stephen M. Rowe, and Ron R. Van Sickle employed their skills as bookmen to track down obscure materials. Those who helped to answer questions relating to notes included Keith Bohannon, Philip F. Callahan, Chris Calkins, Dennis E. Frye, Doug Harvey, Paul B. Harvey, Jr., John Hennessy, Dot Kelly, Jane M. Madsen, Michael P. Musick, Allan Purcell, Dorothy Rapp, Richard A. Sauers, Richard J. Sommers, and John E. Sunder.

Because the Alexander Papers are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I had the pleasure of working once again with Carolyn Wallace and Richard A. Shrader, who showed genuine interest in my project and went beyond the requirements of archival procedure to assist me. The Southern Historical Collection has been my researching home away from home for most of my scholarly life, and I cannot imagine a better place to pursue the past.

Matthew Hodgson and Iris Tillman Hill of the University of North Carolina Press were enthusiastic about this venture from the beginning. Undaunted by the size of the volume, they forgave several delays and agreed to include all of the illustrations and maps that appear in the original manuscript. In short, they were willing to publish Fighting for the Confederacy as it should be published—an admirable attitude in an era when university presses are subject to harsh budgetary realities.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Eileen Anne. She transcribed 1,200 pages of manuscript, helped proofread the entire typescript, and willingly sacrificed countless evenings and weekends over a period of three years. She knows Porter Alexander at least as well as I do, and by all rights her name should appear as coeditor. But she insists otherwise. I cherish our collaboration on this project. The hundreds of hours we spent together in Alexander’s company (invariably with Nipper, our own loyal Buster, not far away) will remain among my most treasured memories.

Gary W. Gallagher

Pennsylvania State University

University Park, Pennsylvania

October 1988

INTRODUCTION

Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander sat astride his horse on the south bank of the James River opposite downtown Richmond early on the morning of 3 April 1865. Decisive Federal assaults the previous two days had brought an end to the grueling siege of Petersburg and compelled R. E. Lee to abandon the Confederate capital. Chief of artillery in James Longstreet’s First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, Alexander had just watched the last of his batteries cross the Mayo Bridge on its way out of the city. It was after sunrise of a bright morning when from the Manchester high grounds we turned to take our last look at the old city for which we had fought so long & so hard, remembered Alexander. It was a sad, a terrible & a solemn sight. I don’t know that any moment in the whole war impressed me more deeply with all its stern realities than this. The whole river front seemed to be in flames, amid which occasional heavy explosions were heard, & the black smoke spreading & hanging over the city seemed to be full of dreadful portents. I rode on with a distinctly heavy heart & with a peculiar sort of feeling of orphanage.¹

The evocative power of this passage from Fighting for the Confederacy might surprise readers who know Alexander principally through his Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative. The latter quickly became a classic following its publication in 1907.² President Theodore Roosevelt acquired one of the first copies and hastened to write Alexander that I have so thoro[ugh]ly enjoyed your ‘Military Memoirs’ that I must write to tell you so. Historian William A. Dunning, who read the volume at least twice in 1907, recommended it to his fellow scholar Frederic Bancroft as a fascinating book. A reviewer in the Army and Navy Journal labeled it one of the most valuable of all books on the war.³ Later opinion echoed these early sentiments. Douglas Southall Freeman considered Alexander’s effort altogether the best critique of the operations of the Army of Northern Virginia. Another prominent historian of the Confederacy characterized it as hard-hitting, authoritative ... honest, fair, and sound. T. Harry Williams’s opinion was that probably no book by a participant in the war has done so much to shape the historical image of that conflict.⁴

As Williams and others noted, the title of Military Memoirs of a Confederate was a misnomer, for the book was really a general history of Lee’s army rather than a record of Alexander’s activities during the war. Alexander used available published sources and carried on a wide correspondence with former officers to make his treatment as accurate as possible. Almost completely unaffected by the mythmaking of the Lost Cause, Alexander had no special case to plead. His tone was detached, analytical, and very impartial; indeed, a common reaction among southerners was that Alexander had been too critical of Lee and Jackson. Maury Klein, author of the only scholarly biography of Alexander, accurately observed that no other Confederate writer equaled the degree of objectivity attained by Alexander.⁵ Occasionally Alexander himself took center stage in Military Memoirs—most notably on 3 July 1863 at Gettysburg—and in a few instances he paused to paint scenes that rival his dramatic account of those last moments at the Mayo Bridge. But on balance he kept himself out of the narrative and curbed his descriptive prose to create a straightforward scholarly work.

Over the years, historians and readers alike have expressed regret over Alexander’s decision to tell so little of his own part in the war. Their frustration is understandable. Alexander’s skill as an engineer, staff officer, and artillerist had placed him constantly at the side of R. E. Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, and others of the southern high command. He participated in nearly all of the great battles in the East, and went west to Chattanooga and Knoxville with the First Corps in the summer and fall of 1863. Privy to so much, and endowed with far more than ordinary intelligence, he was potentially one of the best witnesses in the Army of Northern Virginia. Yet there were literally dozens of places throughout Military Memoirs where Alexander clearly stopped short of relating everything he must have known. One could wish that he had written two books, mused T. Harry Williams, a general history and a more personal narrative. In lamenting Alexander’s omissions, Douglas Southall Freeman suggested that much he could have said for the instruction of soldiers and to the enlightenment of students, he felt it improper to put in print. Whatever the reason for Alexander’s reticence, his decision to tell so little of his own experiences seems one of the great lost opportunities in the literature on the war.⁶

Fighting for the Confederacy is Porter Alexander’s true personal reminiscence.⁷ Remarkable as it may seem in a field that has been studied so exhaustively, the 1,200-page manuscript lay virtually unknown for more than eight decades—a good part of that time at the most famous of all repositories of southern primary materials.⁸ Written several years before Military Memoirs, it is a superlative work offering precisely the type of inside view wished for by so many readers of Military Memoirs. It is utterly candid, filled with memorable descriptions of people and events, and blessed with ample portions of analysis, humor, and sheer drama. If there is a better unpublished source on Confederate affairs in the Virginia theater, a leading historian of Lee’s army wrote of the manuscript, I surely don’t know of it, and can’t wait to see it.⁹ What riches may yet surface cannot be predicted with any certainty, but in the last half-century only the reminiscences of Henry Kyd Douglas and the journal of Jedediah Hotchkiss have approached the quality of Fighting for the Confederacy.¹⁰

How such a treasure remained so obscure makes for an interesting tale. Alexander spent considerable time studying and writing about the war during the three decades after Appomattox. His first project was to have been a history of the First Corps, undertaken at Longstreet’s urging in 1866. Approaching the task with his usual care, Alexander collected a large amount of information. "What I want is not the general facts that everybody knows but the details, he wrote a former member of Longstreet’s staff, & they only exist in the memories of survivors & I have to elicit them by correspondence & you cannot imagine how utterly hopeless a task this seems."¹¹ Increasingly involved with business and frustrated by a poor response from correspondents, Alexander abandoned his project on the First Corps in the late 1860s. But he renewed his study of the conflict in the 1870s, and soon a stream of articles flowed from his active pen. Utilizing material collected for his history of the First Corps, he published pieces in the Southern Historical Society Papers on the Seven Days, Gettysburg, Longstreet’s division in 1861-62, Yorktown and Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, and the Confederate artillery. For the popular Battles and Leaders of the Civil War from Century Magazine, he contributed essays on the artillery at Gettysburg and Longstreet’s Knoxville campaign.¹² Robert Underwood Johnson, a principal editor of Battles and Leaders, fondly remembered Alexander as one of the two most lovable men I met in the long course of our relations to the War Series. His integrity and candor were such that Johnson felt he might rely implicitly on anything...[he] said.¹³

By the mid-1880s Alexander’s children had begun to press him to write a memoir of his role in the war. Always he insisted that much as he would like to accommodate their request, he simply could not budget the requisite time for such a large project. Only rigorous discipline had enabled him to complete his historical articles while pursuing a successful career as an executive with several railroads, banks, and other companies. Even after he retired from railroading in 1892 to become a full-time planter, he somehow remained too busy to undertake a full memoir. A turning point came in 1897 when President Grover Cleveland, who often hunted ducks with Alexander on the latter’s estate in South Carolina, asked him to help arbitrate a boundary dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Being an arbitrator would entail long absences from home; but the remuneration was a thousand dollars a month in gold, and Alexander felt he could not pass up such a windfall for his family. After a difficult leave-taking from his wife, Bettie Mason Alexander, he sailed for Greytown, Nicaragua, in May 1897.¹⁴

Scarcely settled into his quarters in Greytown when a package arrived from his daughter Bessie Alexander Ficklen, Alexander opened the parcel to discover two blank ledger books and a letter urging him to begin work on his reminiscences. Early in June he asked Bettie to tell Bess that I have begun to write in her blank books for my recollections of the war and try to do something every day when there is no special work on hand. Beginning with a long chapter on his youth, years at West Point, and life in the prewar army, Alexander found the task difficult. But when he got to the war, words came more easily, and the task became a labor of love yielding great satisfaction. When I start writing on those times, he confided to his wife in late July 1897, I hardly know where to stop. At first he envisioned a modest work that would fit in the four hundred leaves of Bessie’s two ledger books, but his discussion of First Manassas rapidly filled page after page. Alexander optimistically predicted that his pace soon would increase, observing that it is partly because Manassas being the first battle, when we were all new to it—there is much more temptation to detail than there will be after the narration has gotten used to battles. The first ledger book was en route to his daughter by the second week in August, its narrative complete through the aftermath of First Manassas.¹⁵

Alexander discussed his purpose and methodology in letters to his sister Louise Alexander Gilmer and Frederick M. Colston, a former subordinate in his battalion of artillery. All my life my children have been begging me & I’ve been promising to write out my recollections...of the war, he began one letter to Colston, ... & down here I’ve found leisure enough to make a good start. Working from memory (Alexander’s recall was extraordinary), with few supporting works except a one-volume abridgment of Battles and Leaders, he was writing only for my children & intimate friends. Still, the perfectionist in Alexander bridled at the thought of inaccuracies: "I am as anxious to eliminate all mistakes as if it were for publication, & I know how easily mistakes can creep into any narrative, & particularly into one written as far from books of reference as I am here. He informed Louise that the recollections were not to publish, but only for my children, so of course they are very personal. But partly to tell them the real story of the war, & partly because I was often concerned in important affairs which they will be interested to understand, he went on, I have written, along with my own little doings, a sort of critical narrative of the military game wh[ich] was being played, & I have not hesitated to criticise our moves as I would moves in chess—no matter what General made them. Alexander viewed his effort in Grey town as only a first draft. Once home in South Carolina, he would go over it all at leisure, with all my military library at hand to put on finishing touches, & fill some few gaps." That might take as much as two years, after which he would have the whole thing typed for distribution to his children.¹⁶

The conviction that only those closest to him would see his narrative gave Alexander freedom to express unvarnished opinions about people and events. R. E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and a host of lesser Confederates came in for substantial criticism. Where he thought the southern people as a whole had been wrong, as in their tendency to rely on divine intervention to sustain their cause, he bluntly said so. Nor did he excise profanities in quoting conversations. Descriptions such as those of Joseph E. Johnston in a white-hot fury on the Peninsula and Colonel Ellerbe B. C. Cash’s violent outburst at First Manassas set Fighting for the Confederacy apart from the vast majority of northern and southern recollections. Alexander’s honesty extended to portraying himself as a supremely self-confident, even arrogant young officer with scant patience for the failings of less gifted individuals. He completely avoided the ritual humility and saccharine praise of friend and foe alike characteristic of what might be called the John B. Gordon school of postwar writing.¹⁷

To his doubtless well-thumbed popular edition of Battles and Leaders, Alexander slowly added other reference materials. Some were his own, such as brief diaries that covered the last two years of the war, journals (also brief) for most of 1862, and an official diary for the First Corps covering 7 May-19 October 1864.¹⁸ These stimulated his memory by providing essential details about his movements. Andrew A. Humphreys’s book on the final year of the war in Virginia, William Swinton’s history of the Army of the Potomac, Alfred Roman’s biography of Beauregard, Edward A. Pollard’s history of the Confederacy, and a few magazine articles also helped.¹⁹ On specific questions, he sent queries to a number of former officers in the Army of Northern Virginia.²⁰ Where he was uncertain about something, Alexander either left a blank space or placed a question mark in the margin and continued with his narrative. Missing information and errors could be taken care of when he got home to his library in South Carolina.

For two years Alexander refought the war in his study in Greytown. Having filled the second ledger book and mailed it to Bessie early in 1898, he switched to foolscap and pencil. I find I can get along so much faster than with ink in a small book, he reported to Bettie. In addition, this change would enable him to revise & add notes more easily. "I am delighted if you like my poor little ‘recollections,’ he responded when Bessie praised the initial chapters, but lots of them bring my eyes full of tears as I write. Many sweet memories clustered around the infrequent periods when he and Bettie had been together during the war. Among the happiest had come after the Confederate retreat from Pennsylvania in 1863, and when Alexander neared the end of his section on the battle of Gettysburg, he eagerly anticipated that reunion: I’ll only have to get back safe to Virginia & come & pay you that delightful little visit at Bowling Green. Three days of additional work on the battle intervened before he scribbled a postscript to this letter promising Bettie that tomorrow I’ll get to you at Mrs. Woolfolk’s. Remembering friends also prompted emotional responses. As I am living over all those old scenes, day by day & one by one, he said in reference to his brother-in-law Jeremy Gilmer, ...it comes over me more & more that of all the friendships of my whole life that with him was the most intimate & sympathetic & perfect." An obituary for one of his artillerists called forth an anguished tribute to my dear, splendid, old Captain Parker [who] is gone too! And nobody that ever went has gone to any higher or better place than he went to!²¹

Clearly Alexander was engrossed in his subject, but the onset of war with Spain engendered doubts that he was avoiding more important service. Do you know when I see Fitz Lee, Wheeler & the other boys going back into the Army as Maj. Genls., he admitted to his daughter Bessie, it makes me wonder if I ought not to have thrown up everything here & gone home months ago & gotten into it somehow. Aware that his association with Grover Cleveland would militate against his getting an appointment from Republican William McKinley, Alexander allowed James Longstreet to put in a good word for him. No invitation was forthcoming, however, and with fighting in progress just across the Caribbean in Cuba a subdued Alexander wrote his wife that he was killing time studying Spanish & writing Recollections.²²

That mood did not linger, however, as he tackled the great Confederate victory at Chancellorsville and moved on to Gettysburg and the Overland campaign of 1864. Surprised at how much he had to say about those operations, Alexander marveled in May 1899 that the manuscript keeps just a growing & a growing. He sent the chapters on Gettysburg to Colston, who suggested that the treatment of Lee might be too harsh. "Every criticism I can possibly get is a great favor, Alexander answered. As to what I write being considered an attack on Gen. Lee, I am afraid that there are but too many people who will insist upon regarding as an attack upon him anything wh[ich] admits or implies that he ever did make the slightest mistake in the world." John C. Haskell, Wade Hampton Gibbes, and John Donnell Smith, all of whom served as artillerists under Alexander during the war, as well as other former comrades in the Army of Northern Virginia also reviewed parts of the narrative and supplied information.²³ Hoping to finish by the end of June 1899, Alexander lost time and patience when arbitration kept him from his recollections. In late July, with his deadline already a month past, he complained that he had not written a word for an entire week.²⁴

By late summer 1899 Alexander was devoting all of his energy to the recollections; even fishing, a passion throughout his life, could not entice him from his desk. He had decided that "every body better postpone all reading until I revise & get it all type written. Racing to complete a first draft before he left Nicaragua, he wrote Bettie on 31 August that once home I’ll buckle into [the] Recollex, wh[ich] I fear I cannot finish before I go. So much to write about the last." The last, of course, was the Appomattox campaign, to which Alexander devoted nearly one hundred pages of his manuscript. In an arduous four weeks he traced the downward spiral of Confederate fortunes in Virginia—Five Forks, the fall of Richmond, Sayler’s Creek, and the final painful scene at Appomattox. That September must have been hectic, yet during it Alexander fashioned some of his best prose. The task was finished by 1 October. Twenty-eight months had elapsed since he opened the first ledger book to begin Fighting for the Confederacy. Twelve hundred pages of narrative gave his children a precious legacy. He wrote Bettie that he had been so busy heretofore writing at my Recollex that I w[oul]d never take time for any thing else. Now a reward was in order, and he meant to do some fishing.²⁵

Alexander left Nicaragua on 14 October 1899. He was worried about his beloved Miss Teen, as he called Bettie, because she recently had lost considerable weight, and he suspected she was keeping things back from him. Upon arrival in New York, he found his worst nightmare confirmed. Bettie Mason Alexander was dying. He rushed to Savannah, where Bettie was staying with one of their daughters. Guilt-ridden because of his absence in Nicaragua during her illness, Alexander kept watch at her bedside. His vigil ended with her death on 20 November. Alexander was staggered by the force of this blow, refusing entreaties from his children to move in with them and withdrawing to his plantation on South Island off the coast of Georgetown, South Carolina. There he mourned in isolation until April 1900, when news of the death of his daughter Lucy Roy Alexander Craig further rocked him. "My first loss seemed more peculiarly my own loss & so I seemed more able to bear it, he wrote. But this—this falls with even more crushing weight & overwhelming desolation on others as well & it seems to me just unspeakable." Several months of profound grief followed, while Alexander groped for direction in his life.²⁶

Rallying by August 1900, Alexander settled on a plan for the future. His twin goals would be the improvement of his Sea Island properties and revision of his recollections. September 1900 found him still alone on South Island but "not lonesome—for I am so busy. I’ve actually begun in rewriting my Recollections & that puts an end to every idle moment—for I try to write a little bit every day."²⁷ At first he performed the fine tuning envisioned while he composed the chapters in Greytown. Using different colored inks and writing on the original manuscript, he corrected names, dates, and distances; he added a few sentences and altered others. Slowly his conception of the project evolved, however, and he decided that such tinkering would not be enough. Following his natural inclination to be both precise and definitive, he determined to convert his manuscript into a rigorous critique of the campaigns of Lee’s army. "I want to tell the story professionally," he informed a friend in the summer of 1901, & to comment freely on every professional feature as one w[oul]d comment on moves of chess.²⁸ Convinced that he could not graft the needed changes onto his original manuscript, Alexander ceased to mark up chapters of the first draft and began fresh ones.

What had begun as a paternal favor became a scholar’s quest. The Greytown recollections, which Alexander eventually presented to Bessie Ficklen, fulfilled the promise to tell his part in the war; the new work would be aimed at a larger audience. Alexander formed friendships with several eminent historians of the day—among them William A. Dunning, J. Franklin Jameson, and Frederic Bancroft—who applauded his shift in emphasis and spoke of publication.²⁹ Persuaded that most of his personal observations would be inappropriate in the new study, Alexander left them out in favor of more analysis and detail, thereby sacrificing much of the flavor and immediacy of the Greytown reminiscences. He also added material on Jackson’s Valley campaign, Hood’s Tennessee campaign, and other operations in which he had not participated. In all, Alexander discarded about one third of the Greytown draft and altered much of the rest. As published by Scribner’s in 1907, Military Memoirs brilliantly achieved Alexander’s purpose of examining with surgical precision the military side of the war in the Eastern Theater.

A comparison of Fighting for the Confederacy and Military Memoirs reveals striking contrasts. Most obvious is the greater proportion of personal material in the former and the more scholarly flavor of the latter. In quality of prose, six years of polishing resulted in a smoother, if somewhat duller, style for Military Memoirs. Because Alexander tempered many of his harshest judgments about personalities and deleted almost all of the profane quotations, Military Memoirs lacks the raw power of Fighting for the Confederacy. Chronological emphasis also differs significantly. Fightingfor the Confederacy opens with a long chapter on Alexander’s pre-Civil War life, virtually none of which is in Military Memoirs, and devotes far less space to the war before Gettysburg—about 33 percent as against 57 percent in Military Memoirs. Roughly 13 percent of each covers Gettysburg, but Fighting for the Confederacy allots 47 percent to the campaigns after Gettysburg compared with just 28 percent in Military Memoirs. The closing portions of the two books also differ markedly in effectiveness. The intensity of Alexander’s treatment of the retreat from Richmond to Appomattox in Fighting for the Confederacy is one of the book’s strengths, while the final chapters of Military Memoirs bear the marks of drastic cutting performed with scant regard for the integrity of the narrative.

Scholars interested in Alexander’s writings were long confused by the intermingling in the Alexander Papers of the original manuscript of Fighting for the Confederacy and drafts of the chapters of Military Memoirs. When the papers first came to the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill, the staff faced the difficult problem of how to make sense of various drafts "of a volume of Civil War recollections, published in 1907 as Military Memoirs of a Confederate." The material consisted of manuscripts written in blank books, of sheets of legal size paper fastened together in batches with paper fasteners, and of folders of typescript, all of which were repetitive and confusing to organize and use. Most of it seemed to have been written in the period 1900–1907, and some of it was extensively revised before publication. Unaware that Alexander had completed a full draft well before he did any revising, and bedeviled because the family had not treated the draft as a separate entity, the staff placed segments of the original Greytown manuscript and chapters from the later versions together in chronological files corresponding to the major campaigns of the war. This was a reasonable archival solution to a processing nightmare.³⁰

One result was the disappearance of the two ledger books and hundreds of pages of foolscap of the Greytown manuscript into an intimidating mass assumed to be drafts of Military Memoirs. Canvassing the collection while editing a reprint of Military Memoirs, T. Harry Williams inferred that Alexander had begun writing after 1900 and intended to publish his work from the beginning. Alexander probably had shifted his emphasis from personal experience to analysis, Williams concluded, to conserve space, to avoid controversy, and to give the book a broader appeal. Williams added that the manuscript, if it could be pieced together as a continuous narrative, which would be difficult because of the repetitions, would be considerably longer than the book.³¹ James I. Robertson, Jr., advanced another thesis to account for the absence of more personal description in Military Memoirs. Alexander had indeed written of his own activities, argued Robertson, but what appeared in Military Memoirs was almost entirely different. Perhaps the Scribner’s editors recoiled at the directness and/or bluntness of some of Alexander’s original statements, he speculated, or possibly the manuscript was too long and descriptive in the opinion of the publisher. In any event, someone other than Alexander wrote much of the finished narrative. Robertson thought it tragic that the original memoirs lay forgotten and pondered "how revealing and rewarding it would be if all that was omitted from Military Memoirs of a Confederate could be published in book form."³²

Maury Klein first alerted students of the war to the existence of two quite different accounts. Commenting on Williams’s wish that Alexander had written a personal narrative as well as Military Memoirs, Klein stated that in effect he did just that, for the original Greytown recollections in their fading ledger books comprise a personal narrative. Klein later addressed Robertson’s suggestion that Military Memoirs was ghostwritten by reiterating Alexander’s authorship of both works. The confusion vanishes when one examines Alexander’s extensive papers in detail, wrote Klein, and he mentioned again that the now faded ledgers comprise Alexander’s personal memoir of the war.³³

Klein performed a tremendous service in removing much of the confusion about Alexander’s writings, but he failed to clarify the situation fully. Two major problems awaited anyone seeking the Greytown reminiscences in faded ledgers at the Southern Historical Collection. First, late drafts of chapters in Military Memoirs on Chickamauga and the Wilderness also were written in ledger books—gray ones with maroon leather corners. Second, and more serious, Bessie Alexander Ficklen’s two light-brown ledgers held less than a quarter of the Greytown narrative.³⁴ The balance—everything from the latter stages of the campaign of Second Manassas forward—was on foolscap and other kinds of paper and was far harder to distinguish from drafts of chapters for Military Memoirs. The key to disentangling this material lies in Alexander’s correspondence with family and friends while he was in Greytown. As he went along, he reported how many pages he had written on various parts of the war. For example, on 6 February 1899 he noted, "I’ve just finished Gettysburg 115 pages & 2 maps, & I’ll soon go on with East Tennessee campaign." Similarly, fourteen weeks later he wrote Bettie that ninety pages covering the period 1-20 May 1864 were wrapped and ready to be mailed home.³⁵ A search through the Alexander Papers for chapters corresponding in length to those mentioned in the letters reveals the entire manuscript for Fighting for the Confederacy. Without the clues provided by Alexander himself, identification would be virtually impossible.

Alexander’s two books represent a unique achievement in the literature on the Civil War. Students have known for decades that only a handful of books by participants possess the enduring value of Military Memoirs; as an exercise in dispassionate analysis, it quite simply has no peer. Fighting for the Confederacy will redouble the debt owed to Porter Alexander. In its pages R. E. Lee stands revealed as a complex man displaying not only the gentleness, military brilliance, and nobility of legend, but also humor, frustration, anger, and pettiness. There is fresh information about many commanders on both sides—the existence of an ailment that rendered Gustavus Woodson Smith unable to ride a horse and evidence of Joseph Johnston’s impressive physical strength, to name but two examples—together with severe criticism of Confederate civilian and military leadership. Information on the field artillery in the Army of Northern Virginia abounds. Well-crafted anecdotes illuminate the terror of civilians trapped in the capricious path of the conflict, the casual attitude toward death manifested by soldiers (including Alexander himself) numbed by prolonged exposure to killing, the grimness of daily life in the trenches at Petersburg, the animosity of Confederate soldiers toward blacks in the Federal army, and dozens of other facets of the war. Alexander’s unabashed expressions of affection for comrades highlight the transcendent bond between soldiers of the same unit; his sense of humor and appreciation of irony add spice to an already vigorous narrative. Many of his purely descriptive passages, such as that last long look at Richmond on 3 April 1865, are haunting in their effectiveness.

Fighting for the Confederacy is a book to be savored, one of those wonderful volumes that is both instructive and pleasurable to read. All who traverse its pages will improve their understanding of the Civil War and the people who waged it. They will come to know Porter Alexander as well—and that is one of the great delights of this marvelous book.

EDITOR’S NOTE

The editorial goal of this project was to prepare an accurate, unabridged, and annotated text of the manuscript Alexander wrote while in Greytown, Nicaragua. The result, however, is not a literal transcription of the 1,200-page original. Writing in energetic spurts, Alexander began many sentences with and or but, misspelled many proper names (he had no reference works in which to check many of them), paid little attention to paragraphs, pursued an erratic course with capitalization and punctuation, and left blanks where he lacked necessary information. A number of editorial decisions, none of which alters Alexander’s account in any substantive way, were implemented in an effort to retain the flavor of the manuscript while at the same time helping the modern reader.

Alexander varied wildly in his use of capitals, and with several letters (especially c and s), it sometimes is impossible to distinguish between upper and lower case. Capitalization has been made uniform, following, for the most part, modern usage.

Punctuation in the manuscript also demanded attention. Alexander almost never used apostrophes (either in contractions or for possessives), neglected to put commas in series or other places where absolutely needed, often substituted dashes for periods at the end of sentences, and utilized a number of clumsy devices—for example, placing commas before parentheses and periods after the last word within parentheses. These problems have been corrected, as have constructions in which the original punctuation was distracting or obscured the meaning.

At some points in the manuscript Alexander wrote several pages without a break in paragraphs; at others he made a new paragraph with every sentence. Some of the former have been broken up and some of the latter combined to give the narrative better movement.

Alexander misspelled many proper names, often using two or three spellings for the same person or place. Had he composed the manuscript in his library rather than in Greytown, he certainly would have checked some of these spellings. All misspelled proper names have been corrected and variant spellings have been made consistent according to accepted usage. For example, Alexander used Nine Mile road, 9-Mile road, nine mile road, and 9-mile road in his account of the Seven Days; all have been changed to Nine Mile Road. With several place-names Alexander used common, though incorrect, nineteenth-century spellings—for example, Drury’s Bluff for Drewry’s Bluff, Spottsylvania for Spotsylvania, and Frazier’s Farm and Frazer’s Farm for Frayser’s Farm. These have been retained. Apart from these problems with proper nouns, the manuscript is remarkably free of misspelled words. Most of the handful that do appear consist of one- or two-letter omissions; these missing letters have been supplied without the distracting addition of brackets, although brackets are used when it is necessary to supply an entire word or phrase to clarify Alexander’s meaning. The only word that Alexander consistently got wrong was bivouacked, which he spelled without the k; bivouaced has been retained as an idiosyncratic spelling. Late nineteenth-century conventions about words such as anybody, everything, breastworks, infantryman, and somewhere were fuzzy, and Alexander variously spelled them as one or two words. As a concession to the informal nature of the manuscript, they have not been made uniform. Similarly, alternating British, American, and French spellings for a number of words will be found throughout the text, as will a few archaic and colloquial variations.

The manuscript is filled with abbreviations for ranks, titles, and units, such as Gen, Col, Maj, Regt, Brig, Div, and the like; these remain in the text with periods added. Single letters used in place of a full name—J. for Johnston, L. for Lee—also have been retained. Alexander employed wh as an abbreviation for which, when, and what; wd for would; thru and thro for through; and altho for although. All of these words have been spelled out. Ampersands and &c. have been retained, but superscripts have been deleted.

The blanks Alexander left in his narrative where he was unsure of his information—usually about casualties or distances—are indicated in the text by a baseline rule: ______. Where possible, the missing information is supplied in a note. In the case of casualties, figures from Alexander’s Military Memoirs of a Confederate are given, supplemented by more modern estimates if there is a serious discrepancy.

Alexander crossed out a number of passages in his narrative. It is impossible to state with certainty when he made these changes, but most probably came during the period after 1900 when he was turning the Greytown manuscript into a more scholarly work. In almost all cases the original language is retained and the deletion explained in a note. In a few instances where Alexander merely substituted a word or two with no change in meaning, the new language is retained and the original moved to a note.

Although Alexander was generally careful in citing numbers, a close reading of the statistics in some of his tables reveals small inaccuracies, such as totals that differ slightly from the actual sum of the individual numbers cited. No effort was made to double check all of Alexander’s figures in order to correct minor discrepancies of this sort.

The illustrations in the manuscript of Fighting for the Confederacy are of two kinds: diagrams, sketches, and maps drawn in Alexander’s own hand and illustrations clipped from other sources that Alexander pasted onto the pages of the manuscript. It is readily apparent from their physical appearance which illustrations are original and which are taken from other sources. Because the illustrations could not always have the same placement in published form that they had in the manuscript, indications of their exact placement in the manuscript have been inserted in the text in brackets. To aid in this, the illustrations have been numbered and given brief captions, an identification system of my devising rather than Alexander’s. As is explained in the notes, five of the illustrations included here (Figures 12, 13, 14, 20, and 30) do not actually appear in the manuscript; they are maps that Alexander intended to supply but did not. The intended maps did appear in Military Memoirs, however, and the maps reproduced here are taken from that source.

As a participant’s account, Fighting for the Confederacy stands very well on its own. It reflects Alexander’s opinions and judgments. The endnotes are designed to present information necessary to a full understanding of Alexander’s narrative, not to impose the type of pedantic scholarly apparatus that sometimes overpowers less impressive reminiscences. Where Alexander raises a question or alludes to controversy, the notes point readers to other material. Persons, books, poems, songs, and events are identified briefly within the context of Alexander’s text. There are no summaries of the lives of generals, politicians, and writers who are covered in standard reference tools such as Ezra J. Warner’s Generals in Gray and Generals in Blue, the Dictionary of American Biography, or Robert K. Krick’s Lee’s Colonels. Neither are there extended historiographical forays recapitulating what later writers have said about the topics Alexander covers.

Fighting for the Confederacy will meet the needs of the vast majority of those interested in Porter Alexander’s personal reminiscences. It encompasses the entire original narrative, both text and illustrations. No observation, opinion, or scrap of analysis has been cut. Still, there are those who may need to see the manuscript exactly as written. The answer for them is a trip to the Southern Historical Collection.

Fighting for the Confederacy

Oh, life goes back through years, today,

And we are Men once more!

And yon old hill is Arlington,

And there the Alien Shore!

And over yonder on the heights

The hostile camp fires quiver;

And suddenly twixt us & them

Flows by Potomac’s River.

O’er Stuart’s head, in place of plume,

The long grain now doth wave.

Oft times we’ve seen the violets bloom

O’er Stonewall Jackson’s grave.

Yet age remembers with a sigh

The days that are no more.

Chapter 1 EARLY DAYS

I can recall vividly the occasion when I first heard the idea suggested that the Southern states would secede from the Union under certain circumstances. I think it must have been about 1848. I was a small boy, perfectly devoted to shooting & fishing, & I was the protege, in these amusements, of our excellent neighbor (in Washington, Geo.) Mr. Frank Colley, an old gentleman of 70, but not too old to start at daylight & ride 8 miles to Little River, & sit on the bank & fish all day for a single sucker.

On one of these expeditions, Mr. Colley told me that secession was being talked of, & I remember well the spot in the road where we were, & the pang which the idea sent through me, & my thinking that I would rather lose my gun—my dearest possession on earth—than see it happen.

Two or three years later, at an election for delegates to a state convention, Toombs ran as a Union delegate against Gartrell as a secession candidate.¹

My feelings were so much enlisted that I got into a quarrel with two of the town boys, Jim Hester & Ben Kappell, which came very near ruining my life.

I was told that these two had armed themselves with pistols & intended to whip me. I borrowed an old pepper-box revolver from our overseer, John Eidson, loaded it heavily, & got 6 special Walker’s Anticorosive Caps for the nipples, instead of the common G. D.’s.²

It would be too long to detail the quarrel, but, indignant at being bullied by two older & larger boys, I at last came into collision with Jim Hester. He struck me over the head with a light skinny-stick, breaking it. I drew my revolver &, aiming at his breast, pulled the trigger. It snapped failing to explode the cap. Hester drew a single barrel pistol, while I tried another barrel, which also snapped. This second failure made me think that the Walker caps were made of copper too thick for the hammer of my pistol, & that all six barrels would fail. At [the] same time—while he had drawn a pistol, Hester paused a moment, & made no motion to aim or fire at me. This made me pause in the very act of pulling the trigger for a third trial; for I thought that if I continued to try to shoot, it would make him shoot, & that my pistol would continue to fail on account of my thick caps while his might not. I therefore stopped pulling on the trigger & waited to see what he would do. On this other boys ran in & took both of our pistols away. Some one said to the boy who took mine, See if that pistol is loaded. He raised it over his head & pulled the trigger for the 3rd barrel (it was a self cocker). This time it went off loud & clear.

My father had very recently forbidden my staying at [the] play ground so as to be late at supper, & this little episode kept me until long after supper-time. My brother Charley knew that a difficulty was imminent & he hurried through supper & started out to the play ground, which was in an open lot west of the lawn in front of the house. As he left the house, he heard the report of my pistol (fired by the boy who took it from me) & ran out & met me just leaving the ground, the boys having separated Hester & myself, & started us both home.

Charley & I returned & met Father at the door. Hester’s blow had made my nose bleed, & I had gotten my face bloody from it, & in reply to my father’s rather angry questions, what was the matter, & why I was out so late, I told the whole occurrence. He was much shocked at it—so much so that I did not get the punishment I expected, & felt that I deserved. He & Mr. Hester, Jim’s father (a most excellent man) forbade us both to visit the play ground for a long time, & meanwhile Jim & I made friends.³

But gratitude to a Providence which saved me so narrowly from a calamity which would have ruined my whole life, has led me ever since to avoid & eschew politics, as too prolific of quarrels for one who, like myself, is liable to become reckless of consequences when in a passion.

From my earliest recollection I was very anxious to go to West Point but my father would never listen to it until I was about 14 years old, when two of my sisters had either married, or were about to marry, graduates of the U.S. Mil. Acad., when he gave his consent. I can still recall the occasion. He was sitting in the front porch of the old family home at Washington, Geo., one summer evening about the year 1849, talking with Lawton & Gilmer.⁴ I was in the drawing-room where some of my sisters were playing on the piano & singing & I had fallen asleep on the sofa, when some one, I forget who, came in from the porch calling me & I was waked & brought out on the porch. Then I was told that Father consented to my going to West Pt., provided I would promise to study hard enough to graduate in the engineers. I was wide awake in a moment & ready to promise anything, & from that day all my thoughts & ambitions were of the army. Gilmer drilled me a little in the manual of arms occasionally that summer & in my studies special attention was given those which were taught at West Point.

My father soon went to see [the] Hon. Robt. Toombs, one of our near neighbors, & then the member of the House of Reps, for our district in Geo.—the 8th—to get his promise of the appointment in 1851 when I would be 16. But the place was already filled by W. R. Boggs⁵ of Augusta, who would not graduate until 1853, so Mr. Toombs tried to get for me an apptmt. at large from the president. He nearly succeeded in 1852 but not quite—& I had to wait until Boggs graduated in 1853.

But this delay was doubtless the best thing for me in giving me better preparation & maturer mind, for I was only 18 in May ’53 a few days before I entered as a cadet.

My father had been at great pains not only about my education but that of all of his children. When his four oldest daughters were growing up he brought out Miss Sarah Brackett from Mass. She came in March 1835 & stayed 8 years as a teacher for them, & it resulted in a large & prosperous Seminary under her control with a considerable corps of teachers all from the North, & scholars from all over the state. When the four boys came on next, he brought out several male teachers, of whom Mr. Russell M. Wright of Easthampton Mass., & Dr. A. M. Scudder (who moved to Athens & lived there all his life) were the most prominent. Scudder preceded Wright. I was under S. for only a year or two, & most of my education was under Mr. Wright, who lived & taught in Washington until the war when he had to return north, & still lives, I believe (1894), in Castleton, Vt.⁶

There is little to be said of my boyhood. I was passionately fond of shooting & fishing & my friendship with two old gentlemen, growing from this fondness, was a great source of amusement to my older sisters. They were Mr. Frank Colley, with whom I went fishing, & Mr. James Dyson, with whom I went hunting. My school intimates were Zeb & Dempsey Colley (sons of Mr. Frank C.; & Dempsey [was] killed in the war at Fredbg.), Ned Anthony, Henry Andrews & Garnett A., & Wylie & Jimmy DuBose (Wylie [was] killed in [the] Seven Days at Richmond [in] 1862).⁷

My father had two plantations—one in Liberty Co., Geo. (Hopewell), a rice & Sea Island Cotton place, near Riceboro; & the home place in Washington. There were about forty to 50 Negroes—little & big on each place.⁸ They were all looked after by him & my mother as if they were children. Their clothes were all cut out & made up by the women under my mother’s supervision, & she also taught all the young ones in Sunday afternoon Sabbath-school. Provisions for the whole year were generally made on the plantations, & hog killing & curing was the event of the winter. If he had not raised enough hogs of his own, my father would buy from ten to thirty, from droves which were brought down from Kentucky & Tennessee by hundreds—driven slowly & kept fat on the way. As the most humane way of killing them, I was usually allowed to stay at home & shoot them with a rifle.⁹ A cold day was of course selected for the killing, a large fire of logs 6 to 8 feet long built up with about forty large stones in among the logs, & a big hogshead, in an inclining position at the end of a platform, held the water to scald the hair off, preparatory to cleaning them. [Figure 1 appears here in the manuscript.] The hot rocks from the fire put in the water, & taken out when cold, with a hoe soon had the water boiling. When cleaned & opened the hogs were hung up on the sawpit timbers & let hang all night watched by one or two men sleeping by the big fire & cooking livers &c. all night. [Figure 2 appears here in the manuscript.] About 30 or 40 hogs made a killing & there would be two or three every winter. All hands were at work making lard, sausages, spare ribs, hogs head cheese, jowls, cracklings &c. &c.

Figures 1 and 2. Hogshead and platform; Hogs on sawpit timbers

Of the servants on the Washington place I remember Adam, the lame shoemaker; Jack Ryans, the carpenter (& an excellent one), his wife Morots, the cook, & his children William, Stephen & Joel—all carpenters—James the driver, Tom, who succeeded his mother as cook—who died during the war—& Mary, who was sold at her own request to go with her husband—I don’t remember where finally, but first to a Mr. Cozart; Charles, an old but very faithful man-about-lot & his family—his wife Sukey, daughters Margaret, sold to go to Milledgeville with her husband, Eliza, Maria & Caroline, house girls, [and] son Jim; Old Bob & his wife Dilsey, super-annuated—who lived near the big poplar; Harry the gardener & his family—wife Rhina, sons July & Jacob, daughters Fanny [and] Hester. Then there was Emanuel the foreman at the plantation, wife Kitty, children Jane & Jerry. Then I remember but forget families & relationships [of] Lewis, deaf & a sort of blacksmith, Old Abram, Mercer, Little Johnnie, Mom Peggie, & several young ones growing up when I left home in 1853 for West Point. There was also a regular semptress Mary Ann & a regular washwoman Mary¹⁰ & her daughter Sally.

Miss Sarah Brackett finally married Rev. Nehemiah Adams, a Presbyterian minister of Boston, Mass., & being in bad health came out & spent a winter with my father sometime in the fifties after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dr. A. on his return north wrote a book (intended as a sort of reply I think to Uncle Tom) called A South-side view of Slavery,¹¹ which caused him some trouble with some of his friends at home.

Cadet Life

The winter of 1852 & 1853 I spent in Savh. taking lessons in French & drawing & staying with the Lawtons on South Broad St. In May ’53 I started from Washn., Geo., for West Point, by rail via Augusta, Branchville, Wilmington, Weldon, Richmond, Aquia Creek, Washn. City, &c., taking 3½ days to the trip & stopping in N. Y. at [the] Astor House, then the fashionable hotel. I visited cousin John Hillhouse near Troy, N. Y., & entered at West Point with Bob Anderson from Savh. about June 12th.

At my examination