The 16th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War, Revised and Updated

by Kim Crawford

Overview

On the hot summer evening of July 2, 1863, at the climax of the struggle for a Pennsylvania hill called Little Round Top, four Confederate regiments charge up the western slope, attacking the smallest and most exposed of their Union foe: the 16th Michigan Infantry. Terrible fighting has raged, but what happens next will ultimately—and unfairly—stain the reputation of one of the Army of the Potomac’s veteran combat outfits, made up of men from Detroit, Saginaw, Ontonagon, Hillsdale, Lansing, Adrian, Plymouth, and Albion. In the dramatic interpretation of the struggle for Little Round Top that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, the 16th Michigan Infantry would be remembered as the one that broke during perhaps the most important turning point of the war. Their colonel, a young lawyer from Ann Arbor, would pay with his life, redeeming his own reputation, while a kind of code of silence about what happened at Little Round Top was adopted by the regiment’s survivors. From soldiers’ letters, journals, and memoirs, this book relates their experiences in camp, on the march, and in battle, including their controversial role at Gettysburg, up to the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611863338
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2019
Edition description:	1
Pages:	606
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Kim Crawford is a retired newspaper reporter and author of The Daring Trader: Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory and coauthor of The 4th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War. He has written about Michigan Civil War soldiers for Michigan History magazine, served as guest curator for the Flint Sloan Museum’s 2012 Civil War exhibit, The Brave and the Faithful, and has given talks on both the 4th and 16th Michigan Infantry regiments to historical societies and Civil War roundtables.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

APRIL–SEPTEMBER 1861

THE TIME FOR ACTION HAS ARRIVED

He was one of Michigan's most experienced military men — a West Point graduate who had commanded state volunteers for the Mexican War. An experienced engineer, he worked on important projects for the U.S. government, traveling the Great Lakes region as an officer and a civilian agent in the era of Jackson, building and improving bridges, harbors, and roads. And when news of the Rebel attack on the federal island base called Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor reached him in Flint, that former U.S. Army officer, Thomas B. W. Stockton, quickly wrote out an order to the farmers, mechanics, laborers, and store clerks who served in volunteer militia companies under him:

Flint, April 16, 1861

General Order No. 1

The President of the United States having made a request upon the Governor of this State for one regiment of Infantry to aid in suppressing the combinations &c. against the Union ... I deem it proper to direct that immediate and prompt efforts be made by each of said companies to fill up to the war standard (100 men rank and file), tender their services and hold themselves in readiness to move as soon as ordered. ...

Commanders of Companies will report to me by letter as soon as the order is complied with.

T. B. W. Stockton Major and commanding the 1st Saginaw Valley Battalion

Stockton was a local businessman, 55, about 5 feet, 8 inches tall and tending toward stockiness, with graying auburn hair; a Maine soldier who would serve under him in the Civil War described him simply as "a short, thick, gray-haired man." A lifelong Democrat, Stockton was certain that Michigan's new governor, Republican Austin Blair, would want him to command this newly requested state regiment — one of many new military units President Abraham Lincoln needed to confront the seceding Southern states, to suppress their rebellion. The United States had only a small standing army, and the government did not have the power and central authority in national security matters that it would eventually take on. In times of war, presidents necessarily turned to governors to raise state regiments for federal service.

The authority to create this new Michigan command and to commission or appoint its officers, therefore, rested with Gov. Blair. The same day Stockton issued his order to the militia companies of his part of the state, he wrote to Blair, asking to lead the 1st Michigan Infantry Regiment. After all, he had been commissioned colonel of a regiment of the same designation some thirteen years earlier during the Mexican War, though the conflict was over by the time they got to the scene. But Stockton pointed out that he had the "experience perfectly competent to command and perform all the duties of a regiment which others would have to learn." He enclosed for Blair's consideration an endorsement by leading citizens from his area. "Col. Stockton's known military skills and experience are a sufficient guarantee that he will discharge the duties of that position [as colonel of the 1st Michigan Infantry Regiment] with honor to himself and credit to the state," his supporters wrote, "[we] cheerfully and earnestly urge his appointment."

But Stockton's request to command a new regiment hit a brick wall with Blair. A specific reason for Blair's lack of confidence in the colonel was never publicly discussed in Michigan newspapers, or in later accounts of Stockton's life. Perhaps the political differences between an abolitionist Republican governor with power to appoint Michigan officers and a conservative Democrat who longed for a command were enough to explain it. But there was an aspect of Stockton's past, undiscussed, that would have mattered greatly to Blair, who saw the conflict as a "sacred war" that would end American slavery: Stockton himself had been a slave owner.

* * *

Thomas Baylis Whitmarsh Stockton was born in 1805 and raised in small towns in New York's Catskill Mountains, part of a family with roles in American history long before the Civil War. His father's cousin, Richard Stockton, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, locked up and mistreated by the British. Richard's grandson, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, was a senator, slave owner, and controversial naval war hero who served from the War of 1812 on through the conquest of California during the Mexican War; he was part of a commission that tried to head off the Civil War.

Young Tom Stockton chose an army career, accepted to West Point at age 17 and graduating in 1827. A second lieutenant, he was sent to Jefferson Barracks at St. Louis and then to Ft. Snelling (now St. Paul, Minnesota), serving under future war hero and president Zachary Taylor. There Stockton met his wife, Maria Smith, the teenaged daughter of a Detroit fur trader named Jacob Smith. Smith had been an unofficial agent of influence for the United States among Michigan's Chippewa and Ottawa tribes before and after the War of 1812; Smith and his wife died when Maria was a child, so the girl had lived with her eldest sister, Harriet Smith Garland, and Harriet's husband, then Captain John Garland of the U.S. Army. Lt. Stockton and Maria were married in the spring of 1830 at Ft. Crawford at Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin, then part of the Michigan Territory.

Soon Maria was pregnant. Life on the wilderness frontier was difficult and uncomfortable for the toughest of characters, and this may have been the reason that Stockton, like other officers, bought a slave. He arranged the purchase of a teenaged "mulatto" named Rachel in St. Louis that fall, a domestic servant for Maria. The northern forts were home to small communities of slaves because of this practice — Stockton's brother-in-law, Garland, a Virginian, was a typical example of an army officer-slave owner. Rachel was brought to the Stocktons as they were on their way back to Ft. Snelling, and she was their servant for the next four years, accompanying them to Washington and back to Ft. Crawford. But Rachel got pregnant and gave birth to a son, James Henry, in the spring of 1834. Now Stockton decided he no longer needed a slave. "I sold Rachel having taken her with me to St. Louis, Missouri for that purpose," he wrote later. Undoubtedly, he thought this was the last he would hear of Rachel.

Stockton had been a quartermaster, or supply officer, in the early years of his career, but soon he was assigned to supervise building projects as a topographical engineer in the Great Lakes region, work he continued as a civilian agent of the War Department after resigning from the army. He was elected mayor in Michigan City, Indiana, and eventually moved to Flint, Michigan, where he, John Garland, and other heirs of controversial fur trader Jacob Smith claimed ownership of land due his actions. Smith, who died in 1825, had lined up property there for his children in his dealings with the U.S. and the Chippewa leaders in the early 1800s, and his heirs won the subsequent legal and political struggle for that land; it was why Stockton eventually moved to Flint in the late 1830s, to sell and develop his wife's property.

In the meantime, the young woman who'd been Stockton's slave did not disappear into obscurity — at least not yet. Rachel had been sold by Stockton to an intermediary in St. Louis, who in turn sold her to a slave dealer named William Walker; Rachel claimed Walker beat and assaulted her, and intended to sell her and her young son "down the river" to New Orleans. But Rachel learned about the experiences of other slaves taken north into states and territories where slavery was illegal under federal law; incredible as this may seem, she started a legal battle for her freedom since Missouri allowed slaves, as "poor persons," to bring suit. Stockton's involvement in this case was only a letter in which he described his purchase of Rachel as a personal servant for his family, and how he took her to what became Wisconsin and Minnesota, and to the nation's capital, before selling her.

Rachel's attorney argued that because she had been brought North to "free soil" by Stockton, she was now free. Stockton, he charged, did not have the right to violate federal law by expanding slavery to a place where it was not allowed. Walker's lawyer countered that Stockton, as an army officer, had no choice as to his duty assignment; he should not have to forfeit his "property" — Rachel — because he had been temporarily detained on free soil, a place that was not his permanent residence. Rachel therefore remained a slave, Walker's counsel maintained.

Rachel lost her case in the local circuit court, but appealed to the Supreme Court of Missouri, which ruled in her favor in 1836 — she was free. Rachel v. Walker was an important legal precedent for the next twenty years, establishing that a slave, outside of states or territories where slavery was allowed, was no longer a slave. Rachel became, for a time, the embodiment of the tenet "once free, always free."

What became of Rachel after her victory is unknown, but her former master, Stockton, continued working as an engineering officer and civilian agent over the next decade. Biographical materials say he was "applying to go back into the army" when war broke out with Mexico in 1846, probably meaning he offered to command a new regiment forming after the border dispute in Texas between Mexico and the Democratic administration of James A. Polk turned violent. But it was not until the fall of 1847 that Michigan Gov. William Greenly, also a Democrat, was asked by the War Department to raise a full regiment from Michigan; he commissioned Stockton colonel to command the 1st Michigan Infantry, the only state regiment sent to the conflict.

It was a painfully slow process, recruiting soldiers and traveling to the scene of the war, and it was over as the 1st Michigan arrived in Mexico. The regiment served as an occupying force and supply train guard, with Stockton appointed military governor of the town of Cordova. Though they were never in combat like other state men who served in companies that fought and defeated the Mexican army, scores of 1st Michigan soldiers died of disease — the terrible reality for so many nineteenth-century armies. Stockton's brother-in-law in the regular army, now brevet Brigadier General John Garland, was severely wounded by what today would be called guerilla sniper fire. Garland's soon-to-be sons-in-law, brevet Majors James Longstreet and George Deas — future Confederate officers of importance — were both wounded in combat in Mexico. The subsequent marriages of Longstreet and Deas to Garland's daughters, Louisa and Bessie, nieces of Maria Stockton, meant Col. Stockton was an uncle of sorts to the young soldiers.

Stockton returned to Flint after the war and then moved his family to California in the Gold Rush era of the early 1850s, building telegraph lines and engineering mines, and holding the federal post of customs collector in San Francisco. By the time he moved back to Michigan in 1858, the Supreme Court of the United States had handed down one of the most infamous and controversial decisions in its history — a case in which the 1830s circumstances of Stockton and his former slave Rachel were part of the argument over legal precedent.

That overtly political and stunning court decision was, of course, the 1857 Dred Scott case. Like Rachel, Scott was a slave who had been taken into a Northern state or territory where slavery was illegal, by a physician who received an appointment as an army doctor. But at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger Taney and a majority of justices, who favored slave owners, rejected and wiped out previous case law, and all state and federal laws that extended any rights to blacks. Slaves or ex-slaves had no rights, they ruled, and any law restricting slavery was unconstitutional. Taney thought he was putting an end to the increasingly divisive question of slavery in the United States, but the decision, with its hard reactionary and sectional turn, only inflamed feelings among abolitionists and Northerners unsympathetic to slave owners. It galvanized Republicans, contributing to Lincoln's election in 1860, which in turn led the Southern slave-holding states to secede, their leaders convinced that the election of a "Black Republican" was the first step in the North's ending slavery.

Was it Stockton's past slave ownership that tainted and disqualified him, in the eyes of Austin Blair, from leading a Michigan regiment as the Civil War began? Stockton and the case of Rachel were only mentioned in the hundreds of pages of the Dred Scott decision. Yet it is hard to imagine that Blair, a founding member of the Republican Party, dedicated abolitionist, lawyer, and politician, who had spent his earliest professional life fighting for equal rights for African-Americans, did not know or hear about Stockton's history, especially given that Rachel v. Walker had been an important "freedom case" and precedent for two decades.

A Democrat, Stockton almost certainly had not supported Lincoln or Blair in 1860, and his war diary and letters would show that he was not sympathetic to abolitionists or slaves. Yet he felt secession was treason and had to be stopped. Men of this view were soon called "War Democrats." In Flint, his party's newspaper, the Genesee Democrat, noting his military qualifications, wrote a brief endorsement of Stockton, a short editorial that was copied and republished without comment by the paper's archrival, the Republican Wolverine Citizen. The governor was not moved. "Quite a number of gentlemen have made a like tender [offer] with yourself," Blair diplomatically replied, "and I think it advisable to take a little time for consultation before offering a commission."

Stockton figured that Blair would consult with the Michigan's new adjutant general, Detroit's John Robertson, about such appointments — the adjutant general was the state's military affairs administrator and advisor to the governor. "Now as he will of course consult with you among others," Stockton wrote Robertson, "I would be gratified if you who have known him for so long would give your influence. This regiment is to be called into immediate service and you will know that its field officers at least should be perfectly competent to drill and command. ... There will be little or no spare time to learn. It may be called into action within ten days after muster. With inexperienced commanders, what will be the result?"

But when Robertson issued to him his first official assignment of the war four days later, it was far short of what Stockton had in mind: "I have appointed you Depot Quartermaster and assigned you to duty according to your rank, subject to orders of the Quartermaster General," Robertson wrote. In other words, Stockton was being put in charge of managing military supplies coming into Michigan on trains.

April turned to May, and Michigan's contribution to the war effort grew to four infantry regiments with state plans for more. But while other Michigan men who were Democrats got commissions (like Dwight Woodbury of Adrian, to command the 4th Michigan), Stockton received no appointment. Even Stockton's hometown militia company was chosen to go into the new 2nd Michigan Infantry Regiment as he waited. He pressed the governor again, but Blair's next response left Stockton furious: The governor claimed he had heard Michigan volunteers were not willing to serve under the colonel. In response, Stockton visited seven of the ten companies that were forming the new 5th Michigan Infantry Regiment, asking these men to sign statements that they would serve under him.

"Enclosed I present to you several acquiescences [sic, approvals] of the ten companies attached to the 5th Infantry indicating their desire to serve the United States for three years under me as their Colonel," he wrote to Blair, "thus complying on my part with your request and proving, I trust, that the rumors none were willing to serve under me are and were false. ... I have not had time to see the other three. As however, these seven are clear and over the majority, I presume it will be unnecessary for me to go further and satisfy you. I am not so very unpopular as has been represented to you."

The War Department had just lengthened the term of enlistments of volunteers from three months to three years, and some men willing to serve ninety days reportedly balked at the prospect of a three-year hitch. Stockton's point was that the men of these companies, knowing about the longer enlistment term, did not object to him as their commander. But this was not enough for Blair. May passed into June, and Stockton had time to leave Detroit's busy military camps to return to Flint and complain to the city council about a street drain that was damaging his property.

The next day, June 5, Stockton's brother-in-law, widower and veteran U.S. Army officer John Garland, died in New York City. According to family lore, Garland, though a Virginian, remained loyal to the United States to the end, and counseled his soldier sons-in-law, James Longstreet and George Deas, not to join the rebellion. But they ignored his counsel, resigned from the army, and became officers of the Confederacy. Stockton would face Longstreet in the coming battles of Gaines' Mill and Fredericksburg, Virginia. Because these Confederates jointly owned property in Flint and elsewhere in Michigan through their wives, along with other Garland family members, U.S. marshals from Detroit in the near future would file writs seizing their interest in these lots.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The 16th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War, Revised and Updated"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Kim Crawford.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 April-September 1861: The Time for Action Has Arrived 1

Chapter 2 September 1861-March 1862: Stockton's Worm-Eaters 19

Chapter 3 September 1861-March 1862: The Michigan Lancers 37

Chapter 4 March-May 1862: Victories without Blood Is McClellan's Plan 47

Chapter 5 May-June 1862: The Bullets Rained in Ranks around Me 64

Chapter 6 July-August 1862: It Was Awful to Look Upon 80

Chapter 7 August-September 1862: Hurrah for Hell 92

Chapter 8 September-December 1862: Farewell, McClellan, You Are About Played Out 110

Chapter 9 December 1862-January 1863: A Terrible and Destructive Fire 122

Chapter 10 January-April 1863: This Cussed Soil of Virginia 135

Chapter 11 April-May 1863: All the Devils in Hell 153

Chapter 12 May-July 1863: We Shall Fight before the Fourth of July 165

Chapter 13 July 2,1863: The Most Desperate Fighting I Ever Saw 177

Chapter 14 July-November 1863: We Are Not Fighting for Generals, but Our Country 200

Chapter 15 November 1863-May 1864: Old Lee Is a Tough Cuss 217

Chapter 16 May-June 1864: Battles without Gaining Ground 232

Chapter 17 June-September 1864: I Am Not Much More Than a Shadow 255

Chapter 18 September-December 1864: The Worst Fire a Mortal Ever Endured 273

Chapter 19 December 1864-April 1865: A Blue Whiplash Encircling Lee 288

Chapter 20 April-July 1865: Think of the Noble Spirits We Lost 310

Epilogue. Your Names Are an Eternal Benediction 324

Appendix. Roster of the 16th Michigan Infantry Regiment 337

Notes 479

Bibliography 537

Index 545

Editorial Reviews

Author Kim Crawford has utilized a large selection of primary and secondary sources to provide an outstanding narrative that relates the untold Civil War story of the 16th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The author’s real contribution to the history of the 16th Michigan is not the chronological description of their involvement in the war, which is presented in a fine manner, but rather the detailed minutiae of life in the regiment, which really provides great interest and flavor to the book. Information gathered from unpublished diaries, correspondence, period newspapers, and military service records provides a lively regimental history that is infused with soldiers’ observations and anecdotes as well as their perspectives on issues of a military, political, and social nature. Additionally, copious endnotes and a solid bibliography attest to the scholarship that the author brings to this composition."
—David D. Finney Jr., author of Remembering Michigan’s Civil War Soldiers

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