Shiloh, 1862 (19 page)

“The air was so balmy and sweet. The country is so lovely with the redbud and dogwood in blossom … we came home just as the sun was setting, the most beautiful place in the whole country round. The peach trees all in blossom make it look like a huge bouquet of pinks and the perfume of the honeysuckle has wafted to us on the gentle breeze just as we rode up the Hill from the front gate—never was there a more peaceful happy home and never I believe a happier girl than I. It is too horrible to think of war devastating this beautiful land.”

Yet that is exactly what happened. As spring turned to the summer of 1861, a few of Josie’s former school friends from secessionist families “fell away,” and there was an increasing coolness between Unionists and secessionists that often turned to outright hostility. William Western became a major in the cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Ben Grider, as promised, raised his Union regiment, the Ninth Kentucky, of which he was colonel. Josie’s uncle “Wint” (Winston Henry), a West Pointer, resigned his army commission, saying he “could not conscientiously fight any longer against the South.” His sister, Josie’s mother, said of him, “ ‘Oh! If he had only died or been killed defending the flag and the country for which his fathers fought!’ She begged us never to mention his name to her again—to let him be as one dead—too bad! So sad!”

Josie “got another beautiful letter from Mr. Grafton. It seems cruel not to write him—even if I …” She did not finish the sentence. Josie’s brother, Warner, only 15, ran off and joined the army against his family’s wishes. Somehow he found he way into Ben Grider’s regiment.

Then, at the end of the first summer of the war, General Johnston and the Confederate army came to Bowling Green and occupied the town. General Hardee brought an army of 27,000 to anchor the line behind the Green River—west to Columbus on the Mississippi and east to Virginia and the Cumberland Gap.

Josie had to give up her horseback rides. The soldiers overwhelmed the town and were camped in the orchards and fields at Mount Air. “The fields all trodden down and the fences being burned” (for firewood), she wrote. “Tonight as I looked out from my window at the tents shining white in the moonlight, with here and there a campfire, and hear the various bugle calls from far off and near—there is something thrilling and beautiful in it all, in spite of the underlying and ever-abiding sadness.”

In early October, someone warned Warner Underwood that he was under suspicion of spying for the Union and was being “watched.” A few days later a hundred soldiers “with gleaming axes” marched to the house and began felling the large old oak and walnut trees that had shaded the mansion for decades. The officer in charge said that the hill upon which Mount Air rested commanded a field of fire across the river and had to be cleared, and then they were going to erect a fort with artillery batteries. They tore down the cabin of an elderly slave, and when the man came to Josie’s father crying despair he could not be made to understand why Underwood was powerless to stop the destruction.

Rebel families in town were bolder now and frequently insulting toward Unionists. On November 5 Josie turned 21, worried about her father, who was being harassed, and her mother, who had fallen into ill health. Rebel officers began to make themselves at home at Mount Air. Josie’s father received a letter from his
son-in-law Western, who was quite wealthy and had gotten wind of the situation at Mount Air. He offered to buy the property, slaves and all, for $50,000 in gold (more than $1 million today), reasoning that because he was a Confederate officer the place would be protected and the family could continue living there, just as they were. Underwood was tempted and grateful, but in the end the slaves changed his mind. When he tried to explain the situation to them, they could not understand it—only that they were being sold—and they implored against it wretchedly, Josie recorded: “I never would er believed Mars Warner you’d sell us!” “And dear Pa could not stand it—‘and I never will!’ he said. We will do the best we can together—come what may.”

Over a bleak Christmas holiday Josie, her mother, and other Union women baked pies and cakes to take to Union prisoners who were being held by the Confederates in the Bowling Green stockade. When they returned to Mount Air the great blow came. Josie’s father stood with three Confederate soldiers in the library by the fire and read a document he’d just been given. By order of the commanding general, A. S. Johnston, they were “to vacate the premises immediately.” The Rebel orderly apologized, but the order stood. Underwood managed to get them a single day longer to pack and leave. They were banished.

All day they packed: Their books, the piano, some of the better furniture, and their clothing in trunks went into a wagon. They took up housekeeping in a small lent cabin in the woods about 15 miles from town. Even as the Underwoods left, Confederate officers were prowling the halls of Mount Air, staking out claims for living quarters. The cabin the family settled in had leaks through which icy rain dripped and Mrs. Underwood’s health worsened.
They endured this dingy living through the worst of the winter.

One beastly night in late January the “biggest and most respectable secessionist in town”—and, as well, an old family friend—appeared at the cabin door, warning Josie’s father that soldiers would arrest him the next day for treason, espionage, or both, and that he had best leave at once. With a heavy heart Underwood packed a few things, kissed his wife and daughter, and rode off “into the darkness and the cold night,” hoping to sneak north through the Rebel lines. Next day the soldiers came. Informed that Underwood was not there, they searched the house. As they left, a lieutenant said to Josie, “I’m glad your father isn’t here, Miss. I don’t like this kind of job.”

The dreary winter dragged on in agonizing uncertainty, and then good news. On February 7 word was received that Underwood had gotten safely through the lines and was at Columbia, Kentucky, with Grider and his regiment as well as his son, Warner. Soon it got out that a big battle was raging at Fort Donelson, about a hundred miles to the southwest. A few days after that, two soldiers appeared with a note from a Confederate colonel, saying, “Mr. Underwood—we are about to vacate your premises and advise that you take possession at once lest evil persons destroy the buildings.”

Josie became ecstatic and told her diary, “We are going back to Mount Air. Oh! I am so glad!” Her mother suspected it might be a trick to trap her fugitive husband, but the family quickly mounted their carriage and rode toward Bowling Green. Josie wrote, “Good-bye poor little leaky cabin! And all the good, kind, ignorant people of these woods and this journal, till I can write again in my own old room at dear Mount Air!”

She would never do it. “Mount Air is in ashes!” her next entry cried. Their home was gone, burned to the ground by the time the carriage brought them there. Who did it, they never learned—some spiteful person or persons, civilian or military. Faced with the loss of Fort Henry, Johnston’s army was evacuating Bowling Green, but the Rebel general Hardee had posted handbills warning that anyone caught torching buildings would be shot on sight.

As the Underwoods neared Mount Air it appeared that the house was still there, but that was a mirage; only the gable was standing, and it fell in with a crash just as they arrived and “helplessly watched the smoldering ruins of our once beautiful and happy home. Both orchards were cut down, as well as the avenue of big trees leading [down the drive] toward town—all were gone—not a fence left on the 1000 acres. Ruin, devastation and desolation everywhere!” Then it began to snow.

The Underwoods went to spend the night with Mrs. Hall in town, and next morning the shelling from Buell’s artillery began that interrupted Aunt Sallie’s biscuit bake. “Mike Hall [Mrs. Hall’s bachelor son who lived with her] was so beset he didn’t know what to do and at one point shouted, ‘Great God! What will I do with all these women!’ ” Josie remembered her father telling her that if she was in a house in range of shot to go to the cellar, so that’s what they did. Mike Hall passed a brandy bottle around while some of them prayed and Buell’s shot and shell whistled and crashed into the town. Some of the people rushing by who saw the cellar door open jumped in, and soon they had “quite a heterogeneous crowd—among them the Catholic priest.” As well, one of Josie’s old suitors, Hugh Gwyn, arrived wearing his brand-new Confederate lieutenant’s uniform, which he had just rescued from the tailor,
who had not quite finished sewing up the collar. Josie noticed this, and “as the hours in the cellar wore on, the cannon keeping up the steady booms, everyone felt a little safer in the situation. I offered to sew [Gwyn’s] collar—so he and I rushed out of the cellar into the house where I got Mrs. Hall’s [sewing] basket and sewed it on, whilst he foraged in the pantry.”

They took a picnic feast back to the cellar—half a ham, pickles, as well as the bowl of “cold beat biscuit” that the cook had been kneading when the cannonball entered the kitchen. Going back to the cellar Josie was nearly decapitated by a ball that “whizzed right in front of my face and buried itself in the ground not six feet from us.”

Around dark the shelling slowed and then stopped. They later learned that a deputation of prominent men had gone across the river to convince Buell that the Confederates had all gone, including Hugh Gwyn, who said he was “off to my regiment, if I can find it.” Soon Union troops entered the town. Josie’s older sister Fanny was married to Ben Grider, and Josie and her mother took up residence in her home. The day after the shelling her father arrived, and next day so had her 15-year-old brother Warner, resplendent in his new blue lieutenant’s uniform. They had lost much, but at least the family was together again. It would not be so for long.

A
FUROR CONVULSED THE
S
OUTH IMMEDIATELY
after the loss of Forts Henry and Donelson and the evacuation of Columbus and Bowling Green. It was aimed mostly at Albert Sidney Johnston but also rubbed off on Jefferson Davis, since he was the one who had sent him west with such great expectations. On February 22, 1862, a second inaugural was held for Davis in Richmond, the new Confederate capital, during which he remarked, “Battles have been fought, sieges have been conducted and the tide for the moment is against us. We have had our trials and difficulties. That we are to escape them in the future is not to be hoped. It was to be expected when we entered this war that it would expose our people to sacrifices and cost them much, both of money and blood.” He went on to predict that the South would overcome these difficulties and prevail, but the gloomy assessment by the president was unprecedented, and he was heavily condemned in the press.

Yet the press and the public seemed to reserve a special scorn for Sidney Johnston, whom they had been assured was to be the savior of the West. “Every hamlet resounded with denunciation, and every breast was filled with indignation at the author of such calamities,” wrote Johnston’s son Col. William Preston Johnston, who served on his father’s staff. The general, the younger Johnston said, “became the special target of every accusation, including imbecility, cowardice, and treason.” A deputation of politicians appeared at Davis’s door to demand Johnston be relieved, to whom Davis sourly replied, “If Sidney Johnston is not a general, I have none.” When Davis and others urged Johnston to defend himself, his answer underscores part of the reason Winfield Scott called him “the finest soldier I have ever commanded” and deserves close attention.

Albert Sidney Johnston was near to a legend for men on both sides of the war who had served in the old army. Handsome and “powerfully made,” he was over six feet tall with wavy gray hair and a piratical mustache, and he exuded the highest air of command. Phillip D. Stephenson, a private of the 13th Arkansas, hung around his headquarters one day in hopes of getting a glimpse. “If ever a man
looked
the ‘great man’ Albert Sidney Johnston did,” Private Stephenson wrote later. “A martial figure, although dressed in civilian clothes. I saw him but once, a black felt ‘slouch’ had shaded his features as he walked head down as though buried in deep thought. He looked like an old Viking king!”