Shiloh, 1862 (48 page)

More friends turned up wounded but at least springtime took hold. Numerous homes and buildings in Bowling Green had been turned into hospitals, and the city continued to be garrisoned by Union soldiers. Josie resumed her late afternoon rides over the fields of Mount Air, surrounding the charred remains of the plantation house. “I haven’t heard a word from Tom Grafton since the Confederates left Bowling Green,” she wrote on May 9, 1862, a month after the battle. “At first I thought it well, since by other means I could not find it in my heart to forbid his writing. Today I would give anything for one of his letters.”

Summer came. Josie’s father and his friend Congressman Grider managed to see that brother Warner received an appointment to West Point, which ensured that he would be out of the war for at least the foreseeable future. Josie worried about the family finances. “Pa’s law practice is all broken up,” she said, and the slaves at Mount Air “hardly make enough for their own living.”

Then, for a change, fortune seemed to smile on the Underwoods. Despite his fierce opposition to Lincoln’s election, Josie’s
father was appointed as U.S. consul to Glasgow, Scotland. They would leave for Washington at once, and Josie was going along as well. Lincoln, through the Kentucky politicians Henry Grider and John Crittenden, had been made aware of the Underwoods’ misfortune, and the President told Josie’s father that he had serious concerns about the warships the Scots were building for the Confederate navy on the river Clyde. He said that for the U.S. consul he “wanted a good lawyer—a
strong Presbyterian and
a Southern Union man, and that Pa fit the bill,” Josie wrote.

While they were in the capital city Josie met and mixed with the crème de la crème of Washington society. On the first day, she was introduced to the Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, and Lincoln’s future judge advocate general of the army Joseph Holt, and there were senators, congressmen, and generals galore. On the second day she even met President Lincoln himself, by accident, when he was out riding near the White House. “He was on a long-tailed black pony (the horse looked so small) galloping along—a high silk hat on his head—black cloth suit on, the long coat tails flying behind him.”

Lincoln stopped as Josie’s father pulled up the carriage they were riding in. (Her father had known Lincoln previously in Congress.) The President “leaned over, shook hands with us,” Josie said, “then slouched down on one side of the saddle, as any old farmer would do, and talked for about ten or 15 minutes with us.” Josie thought the President was “a very common-looking man … but I must confess there was a kindliness in his face.”

The rest of her visit was like a tale from a storybook. Josie met a prince and a princess, was nearly mixed up in a duel, and became the object of (an unsuccessful) seduction by an infamous ladies’ man. By
the end of July she was home again, awaiting her father’s confirmation as U.S. consul. “All my life,” she wrote in her diary, “I have longed to go to Europe. Now, Oh! How I hate to go so far away.”

She and her mother again got into difficulty with the authorities for bringing food to prisoners—only this time it was with Union authorities over Confederate prisoners captured at Shiloh. Josie and her mother felt sorry for them, and had brought them some pies and cakes, when “a little upstart of an officer came up to me with a smirk,” Josie said, and warned her to “be careful giving aid and comfort to rebels”—to which she “replied in a flash—when I wish advice I will seek it from
my friends.”

The summer of 1862 slipped away. Her cousin Winston was wounded serving with Stonewall Jackson in Virginia; her sister had a baby and the good news was sent through Union lines to her brother-in-law William Western, who was commanding a cavalry battalion with Bedford Forrest. Then on September 3 a letter came.

“Tom Grafton dead! Killed!” She fairly shrieked it out.

“At [the Battle of] Fair Oaks, near Richmond. A bursting shell—Oh! It is too horrible! ‘No one in the world to grieve if I should die,’ he said. Ah! Tom Grafton—how mistaken you were.”

A week later Josie packed her diary in the trunk that would carry it to Scotland. “All our friends have been coming here to-day to say good bye. Who knows when or how we will meet again.” The family sailed for Great Britain a few days later but Josie never resumed her journal.

When the war ended they returned to Bowling Green but life was not kind. Union soldiers had carried off all the livestock at Mount Air and practically everything else, including a large and valuable storage of wood and 35,000 bricks from the burned
home that Underwood had salvaged in contemplation of building a new house. He sold off portions of the land and tried to resume his law practice but suffered a stroke in 1868 and died four years later. Somehow the remainder of Mount Air was lost, and in 1870 Josie married a New Yorker named Charles Nazro who started a bank in Bowling Green that soon failed. They then moved to Ballston Spa, New York, near Saratoga Springs, where Nazro obtained a low-paying office job. Though they lived in rented properties and were always short of money, during the next ten years Josie bore four children—two boys and two girls—and in 1889 the family drifted west, first to Denver then to San Diego where, in 1898, her husband died.

Afterward, Josie returned to live out the rest of her years in Bowling Green, where she relied on the kindness of friends and relatives and became active in literary and community organizations. She doubtless visited Mount Air but left no record of it and died in 1923. Among her meager possessions was the journal she kept from 1860 to 1862, which she willed to her 18-year-old granddaughter in Texas. There were only a few notations in Josie’s diary following the death of Tom Grafton in 1862, but at the very last is a verse of poetry, the entry undated, a stanza from “Adieu,” by Thomas Carlyle, as follows:

The casualties of the Civil War of course weren’t limited to the battlefield. Everywhere, North and South, the conflict cast a long and tragic shadow. Millions were affected and scarcely a home was untouched. It has been estimated that Civil War casualties, if measured by a percentage of today’s U.S. population, would exceed 50 million, with 10 million of that number dead. Yet the toll of accumulated human suffering by the Josie Underwoods of the era remains incalculable.

F
OR WEEKS AFTER THE BATTLE
, P
ITTSBURG
L
ANDING
resembled a colossal slaughterhouse. People told of hospital boats headed downriver leaving a trail of human limbs in their wake as the surgeons plied their grisly trade and flung the results overboard. The day after the battle Beauregard sent a messenger asking for a truce to bury his dead, but Grant refused him, saying he was already having the Confederate bodies buried along with those of Union soldiers. The weather was getting warm, Grant said; there was no time for politesse. Beauregard had also asked Grant for permission for local families to enter the battlefield to look for sons killed or wounded in the fight, but Grant denied this as well. He still considered it a battlefield, with all the grim implications of that term.

In many cases the original burial parties had not dug their pits deep enough, so that arms, legs, and even heads sometimes protruded above the ground. The hundreds of dead horses also posed
a serious problem; they tried burning them, but that did not work well. Burying a horse is hard, time-consuming work and there was concern of a cholera outbreak. Even after Halleck began creeping the army south toward Corinth, a sizable detachment had to remain at the landing to process the train of the supplies to the army, all of which came by boat and had to be moved along the roads where the fighting had taken place. As the spring weather warmed, the stench, they said, was sickening, and with it came a biblical-size plague of bluebottle flies.

On the Tuesday after the battle, nine-year-old Elsie Duncan’s mother “was on the verge of despair.” She had tried to get inside the Union lines to look for her sons, afraid that they were dead or wounded, but because of Grant’s order “the sentinels would not let her through.” Then the older son, Joe, appeared. “He was black with gunsmoke,” Elsie said. “His hat and coat was gone. His pants were torn with bullets but his flesh was not touched. Mother saw him and ran to meet him. He said, ‘Oh, mother,’ and caught her in his arms.”

She spoke of the burying parties and said that, contrary to the official version, “The Yankees did not bury the Confederate dead. They threw them into the gullies and ravines and covered them with leaves and left them for the hogs to root up and eat up.” This, she said indignantly, “I know to be the
truth
. I could not understand anyone to be so heartless to leave a human being unburied even if they were a rebel—they were dead.”

“After the battle, everything was peaceful for a short time,” Elsie wrote. She remembered Grant as “good and kind and did not allow his people to mistreat anyone or anything that we had left.” She and the other small children played with the Yankee soldiers who
sometimes gave them small presents, and Elsie’s mother nursed the soldiers through epidemics of diarrhea and other ailments. Times were hard. All of their livestock had vanished during the battle. They planted a small garden to get by through the winter. Elsie’s mother “made us clothes out of shirts and other things we picked up on the battlefield.” Her mother also started a small school at home for neighborhood children; as many as 20 attended. One day after Corinth had been taken, “We saw a long line of soldiers, we could hear the horses feet,” Elsie said. Next day, all the army camps were deserted. The Union soldiers had gone and darker times fell on Shiloh because, as Elsie wrote, “When the Yankee army marched away we were left without any protection.”

Partisan groups, with old scores to settle, cropped up all over the county. Initially acting under the guise of representing the Federal army, these guerrillas were hardly more than nightriders, robbing, hanging, and threatening to hang anyone they had it in for—including Elsie’s father, Joseph, who not only had served with the Rebel army but owned land and had some degree of wealth, making him a target. He and his older sons were forced to hide out in the cave, or “hut,” deep in the woods as the partisans searched Elsie’s house for them and threatened to hang anyone who gave him assistance—including Elsie’s mother. These riffraff tore up the Duncans’ garden, then demanded a huge kettle to cook the vegetables in—and out of plain meanness they cooked Elsie’s pet cat.

An era of lawlessness descended on Hardin County. Rival partisan groups composed of men who claimed to be Confederates were also organized, and they were just as bad as the others. Basically, it was an excuse for low-minded people to run rampant, steal, and terrorize.

Finally Joseph Duncan took the family away. He had relatives and friends all over Tennessee and they stayed gone through most of the war, and even afterward returned to Shiloh only to work the land. When Elsie turned 16, her father died; and in 1871, when she turned 18, she married 36-year-old Branch Tanner Hurt, Jr., of Petersburg, Virginia, who had been a major in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The wedding was held at the fashionable Peabody hotel in Memphis.

Elsie’s mother took her remaining children and returned to Shiloh, but “where the house had stood was a briar patch,” Elsie said. As her mother sat looking at it a man came up and introduced himself as the son of a wounded Yankee soldier whom Elsie’s father had given water to on the battlefield that terrible Sunday. He took in Elsie’s family at his own place nearby until they could get a new house started. Her mother “planted out the old orchard that was shot all to pieces in the battle. Only one peach tree was left,” Elsie wrote.

In time, and now with a 15-month-old child of her own—the first of ten she would bear over the years—Elsie paid a visit to Shiloh, “but I was sorry I went there,” she said. “All of the things I had thought were so beautiful were all gone.” When the visit was over, Elsie caught a steamboat to Shreveport where she met her new husband. They bought a wagon and a team and, like so many others in those times, headed for Texas, but it was not for them. The couple returned to Mississippi and settled at Courtland, near Oxford, about 60 miles south of Memphis, where Major Hurt opened a successful mercantile business.