Today is the 143rd anniversary of the battle of Fort Stevens. The heaviest fighting, mostly in the area now occupied by Walter Reed AMC, took place today until it sputtered out at dusk.
One of those observing the action was a battlefield tourist, Lucius Chittenden, a treasury official who had used his connections to get to the front. His descriptions, both in his later book and in an unpublished manuscript, are an invaluable look at the events of the day, the more so because he was a civilian and described things that no soldier would bother to mention.
For instance, he describes a dead Confederate sharpshooter after the battle, one of the few we have of them in the field:
There, behind the log, he lay, on his back, his open eyes gazing upwards, with a peaceful expression on his rugged face. In the middle of his forehead was the small wound which had ended his career. A single crimson line led from it, along his face, to where the blood dropped upon the ground. A minié-rifle, discharged, was grasped in his right hand; a box, with a single remaining cartridge, was fast to his side. The rifle and cartridge-box were of English make, and the only things about him which did not indicate extreme destitution. His feet, wrapped in rags, had coarse shoes upon them, so worn and full of holes that they were only held together by many pieces of thick twine. Ragged trousers, a jacket, and a shirt of what used to be called “tow-cloth,” a straw hat, which had lost a large portion of both crown and rim, completed his attire. His hair was a mat of dust and grime; his face and body were thickly coated with dust and dirt, which gave him the color of the red Virginia clay.A haversack hung from his shoulder. Its contents were a jack-knife, a plug of twisted tobacco, a tin cup, and about two quarts of coarsely cracked corn, with, perhaps, an ounce of salt, tied in a rag. My notes, made the next day, say that this corn had been ground upon the cob, making the provender which the Western farmer feeds to his cattle. This was a complete inventory of the belongings of one Confederate soldier.
How long he had been defending Richmond I do not know. But it was apparent that he, with Early’s army, during the past six weeks had entered the valley at Staunton, and had marched more than three hundred miles, ready to fight every day, until now, when in the front, he was acting as a sharp-shooter before Washington. He was evidently from the poorest class of Southern whites.
What motivated this man to fight? Chittenden couldn’t ask him then and we can’t ask him now. Preservation of slavery? It’s a good guess that he didn’t own any, in fact he may not have owned any property at all. Nationalism? Or was he simply a dupe of the ruling classes, a victim of false consciousness?
Whatever the reasons, they were important to him, because one did not get to be a sharpshooter — the elite of the army — without a demonstrated “fidelity to the Southern cause.”
I suspect his motives, and those of many others, might be more complex than we are willing to admit today.
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