Flashback, July 1871: Death of David H. Todd, Lincoln’s Notorious Confederate In-Law

Less than two weeks after Mary Todd Lincoln mourned the death of her 17-year-old son Tad, the widow of Abraham Lincoln had to deal with the loss of another family member.

But the former First Lady felt far more mixed emotions upon learning of the death from tuberculosis at the end of July 1871 of David Humphreys Todd in Huntsville, AL. It wasn’t just that she was not as close to this half-brother 14 years her junior than she was with the third of her sons to die before reaching adulthood.

No, David would have reminded her of a deeply painful split that mirrored a larger division in all too many American families. Of the 14 offspring of her father, the prominent Kentucky lawyer, soldier and politician Robert Smith Todd, six had sided with the Union while the others supported the Confederacy that President Lincoln had successfully but bloodily suppressed. In this “brothers’ war,” two male Todd siblings died fighting for the South, while two of the Todd daughters (including Mary) lost their husbands during the conflict.

From the age of 14, when David had run away from home to fight in the Mexican War, he had troubled family members with his impulsiveness. Matters would not improve in adulthood, when his actions in the Civil War gave the enemies of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln grist for calumny.

Lack of combat in the Mexican War left David’s appetite for adventure and glory unsatisfied, even as he developed a propensity to drink and gamble. After journeying out to California in 1850 for the gold rush, he went down to Chile the following year to participate in its revolution as “freebooter,” or soldier for hire. The only tangible results of the latter were tattoos he had made. Later in the decade, he worked without making any particular mark for a New Orleans carriage company.

The outbreak of the Civil War put David and his siblings in a quandary. Their plantations and the aristocratic style it supported were unsustainable without slaves.

At the same time, they now had a brother-in-law—previously embraced, through marriage to Mary, as part of the family—who, while willing to permit slavery in states like Kentucky, was committed to halting its expansion into new American territories.

As Stephen Berry noted in his collective biography of the Todds, House of Abraham, these bluegrass bluebloods had, in a sense, become Abraham Lincoln’s surrogate family, filling the void left by an abusive father and a sister who died in childbirth. The fact that he seldom if ever spoke of slaveholders with the blistering rhetoric used by so many abolitionists may have owed something to knowing and cherishing some as in-laws.

That did not mean, however, that he was blind to their faults. One legend had him joking, “God Almighty is perfectly content having one ‘d’ at the end of his name. The Todds insist on having two.” Litigiousness and alcoholism ran as heavily in the family as intelligence and ambition.

As First Lady, Mary was prone to extravagance and outbursts of anger, but her husband’s opponents also engaged in guilt by association in charging her with disloyalty because of some siblings’ support of the Confederacy. The more extreme members of the press even accused her of spying, forcing her husband to appear voluntarily before Congress to deny the rumors.

Negative reports by sensationalistic Northern newspapers—particularly about David, and Mary’s attitude towards him—vexed the Confederate contingent of the family, as seen in this excerpt from a July 1861 letter by Mary’s younger half-sister Elodie:

“I see from today’s paper Mrs. Lincoln is indignant at my Bro. David’s being in the Confederate service and declares ‘that by no word or act of hers should he escape punishment for his treason against her husband’s government should he fall into their hands.’ I do not believe she ever said it and if she did and meant it she is no longer a sister of mine nor deserves to be called a woman of nobleness and truth and God grant my noble and brave-hearted brother will never fall into their hands and have to suffer death twice over, and he could do nothing which could make me prouder of him than he is doing now, fighting for his country. What would she do to me, do you suppose? I have as much to answer for.”

Rushing to the Confederate cause after Fort Sumter, Elodie’s “noble and brave-hearted brother” was assigned to General John H. Winder, commandant of Richmond’s prisons—just as the Confederacy pondered what to do with 1,400 Union prisoners taken at the Battle of Bull Run.

Winder, desiring to move captured Union soldiers away from any campaigns for the Confederate capital, wanted David to transport them to Raleigh, N.C. But before that could happen, these prisoners were ensnared in the propaganda war between North and South.

Separating truth from falsehood was difficult enough while David was alive, but it only grew more so after his death. Records often proved elusive, and the children of family members, recalling events more than half a century later, often compounded the difficulties of historians.

It may very well be that, like Mary, David was more sinner against than sinning. But it is also true that, like her, he was thrust in a situation requiring tact that he didn’t possess.

Before long, David was being accused of cruelty to Northern prisoners at Richmond’s Libby Prison. Although he was not as bad as the notorious Henry Wirz of Andersonville and at least some stories about him appear to have been exaggerated, he angered Union service personnel often: preventing spirits from being brought into the prison, for instance; telling guards in this unventilated, hot converted warehouse to shoot off any part of a body sticking out a window; and, according to Union seaman Lewis Horton, “saber[ing] a poor fellow one day because the prisoner had a small bit of lighted candle in order to see to dress his wound” and executing another for just looking out the window.

By November 1862, David featured prominently in a Harper’s Weekly story on the Confederate ties of Mary’s siblings. The magazine even claimed that Jefferson Davis had fired Mary’s half-brother for inhumane treatment of prisoners after David had been only two months on the job.

If the Confederate President did, in fact, relieve him of this command, David may have felt he was being done a favor. By early 1862, David had had enough, and began to look around to where he could be more useful. 

“Having no duty to perform in this Regt, and nothing to which I can be assigned,” he requested a transfer to New Orleans. He got his wish, at a time when Union forces were pressing hard on the city and the Mississippi, the crucial waterway bringing food, supplies and troops to the Southern cause.

By May he was appearing on the regiment rolls as a lieutenant, and in a few more months he had been promoted to captain in the Siege of Vicksburg. He was gaining a reputation as a fighter, though he would surely not have liked a description of him by a female diarist, Julia Le Grand of New Orleans, as “tall, fat and savage against the Yankees.”

After Vicksburg fell to Ulysses S. Grant in July 1863, Captain Todd was paroled. Any hopes for military glory were fading, as the North consolidated its stranglehold on the deep South and David’s health began to worsen.

It was not true, as some later historians wrote, that David had been “mortally wounded” while defending Vicksburg.

But, in an application for retirement from the army, he explained that he had “been permanently disabled in the service of the Confederate States and in the line of duty, by Phthisis Pulmonulis (i.e. tuberculosis) caused by exposure and from which I have suffered during the past two years with frequent attacks of Hemoptysis (i.e. expectoration of blood). I have been absent from my Command unable to perform duty for the past four months.”

In late 1864, David began to court a young widow, Susie Williamson, in Huntsville, AL. They married April 4, 1865—five days before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, and 10 days before David’s brother-in-law was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater.

David was listed as a merchant in the 1870 Census, but he had very little time to succeed in the profession. He died of tuberculosis the following year. As for his half-sister: Throughout the remaining 17 years of her troubled widowhood, Mary Todd Lincoln never saw any of her surviving siblings again.

Flashback, April 1863: Women Riot for Bread in Civil War Richmond

The first distinct sign that the Confederacy would experience a year from which it would never recover came after a cold winter. The citizens of Richmond, Va., already pinched by a Northern blockade of Southern ports, now experienced hunger when a snowstorm two weeks before stopped food shipments to local markets. On April 1, 1863, women gathered in a church decided to demand—and, if necessary, to seize—food. The following day, these women, now grown to a thousand participants, marched for a mile through the Confederate capital, looting stores and stopping only after a tense face-off with the city’s most important officials—the mayor, the governor, and Jefferson Davis himself.

In contrast with the New York City Draft Riots later that year (recounted in a prior post of mine), the Richmond Bread Riot resulted in no loss of life and far less negative publicity. But it was a far more disturbing harbinger of things to come for the South.

Part of what made the Bread Riot such a terrible omen was the blunt manner in which it exposed the South’s feeble foundation of sex, class and race. In the antebellum Southern view, poor whites could not be regarded as the lowest element of society because African-American slaves already occupied that position. Moreover, unlike in the industrial North, women might supervise the household, but they would be spared the hard menial work of men.

But two years into the fighting, a different reality had intruded. With the North already enjoying a manpower advantage at the time of Fort Sumter, there was a significant need for the services of virtually every able-bodied Southern male. But that meant fewer men to help with harvests that were increasingly critical.

The Confederate attempt to counter the problem only worsened.it. The “Twenty Negro Act,” passed in October 1862, exempted “owners or overseers of twenty or more slaves” from serving in the armed forces. While the legislators intended this as an incentive to plant, the lower classes perceived it otherwise. Most Southerner whites did not own slaves, and fewer still owned 20 or more.They saw favoritism at play.

The North had a similar problem that would later be at the root of the New York Draft Riot: $300 would allow a man to hire a poorer one to fight in his place. The South, with its oligarchic society, had an even worse case of what was shaping up to be, in an increasing slogan of the time, “a rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.”

While both incidents were markers of significant dissent in the North and South, the Draft Riots were sui generis, perhaps the worst point in Union feeling over the conduct of the Civil War in terms of how it affected the poor. In contrast, the Richmond Bread Riot was part of a larger wave of hunger-motivated civil disturbances that also affected Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, and Macon, Georgia; in Salisbury and High Point, North Carolina; and in Mobile, Alabama. The problem only became more acute as time went on. The need to keep word of this from leaking out, lest it undercut morale at the homefront, became more acute, making a necessity of press management and even censorship.

Nearly two years before, the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States had given Davis the power to censor the telegraph. Voluntary censorship guidelines had been distributed later to ensure no information about troop movements was made known. Denial of reporters’ access to battles was an additional weapon to restrict the flow of information, according to Anthony R. Fellows’ American Media History (2009).

Still, the inchoate unrest now made apparent by the bread riot required an entirely different exercise in press management. The Davis administration had to plead directly with reporters not to report the incident, arguing that it would be detrimental to the South. The plea worked, to some extent, as even those newspapers that seldom missed an opportunity to snap at Davis’ heels agreed to his request to spike the story.

Still, this censorship was not airtight. The Northern Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper contained an account of the incident nearly a month after the event, and more and more Southerners became aware, at least generally, of what happened.

The need arose to shore up, to any extent possible, the shaky edifice of Southern values. And so, the desperate women who participated in the march had to be marginalized, even de-feminized.

At the heart of the protest were a group of women who gathered in Belvidere Baptist Church on April 1--workers in Confederate ordnance establishments and the wives of laborers in the Tredegar Iron Works, the major arsenal of the Southern war effort. Besides all of the pressures discussed previously, they also faced problems associated with a bursting new national capital.

Richmond, like its opposite number, Washington, was thronged with transients, but two years into the war it wasn’t only those seeking work in a new capital, but also refugees fleeing war’s horrors. Rents rose drastically, leaving even less money for families.

The women in the church were addressed by Mary Jackson, a thirtysomething mother of four who worked in a local market. Over time, the justice of her complaint—that authorities were doing little if anything about their mounting misery—was cast aside by (largely male) historians, who focused on distinctly unwholesome descriptions provided by some at the time: that she was “large,” that she carried a bowie knife, that she was, variously, a “virago,” an “extortioner.” Those she would lead came in for equally defamatory treatment: “a handful of prostitutes, professional thieves, Irish and Yankee hags, gallows-birds from all lands but our own," in the words of the Richmond Examiner.

The women had determined to take their complaints to Governor John L. Letcher, but they were not satisfied (later accounts differed as to whether he actually met with them or not). At this point, they took to the streets, now joined by a number of men, in what was turning into a mob. A woman raised a rail-thin arm and screamed, "We celebrate our right to live! We are starving!" Other onlookers heard the chant "Bread or blood!"

Making their way toward the central business district, the crowd broke into government warehouses, grocery stores, and various mercantile stores, seizing food, clothing, wagons, jewelry, other luxury goods—whatever came to hand.

At Mayo Street, the crowd ignored the mayor’s reading of the riot act. Finally, Jefferson Davis himself came out. Accounts vary again about what he told them. Some said that he emptied his pockets of spare change and threw it out to the crowd; others, that he pleaded with the group to peacefully disperse; others, that he gave them five minutes to go, took out his watch, and began to count off the minutes before the crowd would be fired upon. With cannon squarely facing them now, the group gave up and went home. More than 60 men and women were arrested and tried for their role in the greatest civil disturbance to hit the South during the war.

Frightened by their close call, Southern officials stepped up their relief efforts for the poor. But by now, a terrible dynamic had taken control. More land was coming under Federal control, starting across the Alleghenies and radiating east. The spread of Union influence meant that slaves were also abandoning the plantations of their masters, in many cases forcing women and less able-bodied men into the fields.Now, it wasn't only the poor facing starvation, but also wealthy planters. Margaret Mitchell's treatment of slavery in Gone With the Wind might have been wrongheaded, but her description of the privations of Tara--leading to Scarlett O'Hara's climactic cry of the heart, "I'll never go hungry again!"--was based on reality.

At the same time, the Richmond protest—as well as other, smaller-scale ones (such as one six months later in Mobile that I described in a prior post)—demonstrated the growing futility of the national government of the Confederacy. Now local and state officials in the South increasingly interposed themselves when they thought that Davis’ actions were endangering the welfare of their citizens. It was the natural outcome of a movement inspired by the rhetoric of states’ rights. A year after the Richmond protest, Davis himself took to lamenting the turn taken by the movement he had spearheaded before the war: “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.”

Flashback, June-July 1862: Lee Takes Command

The creation of the Robert E. Lee legend in the collective mind of the South was hardly preordained. Many in the Confederacy—including the common soldiers he would call on, time and again, to perform extraordinary deeds on the battlefield—were apt to write him off in the early part of 1862 because of a poor showing in western Virginia over the winter.  And his visibility was not high, because of his largely behind-the-scenes role as military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

But by mid-year 1862, several factors led Lee on a course with destiny:

·       

           *   Union General George B. McClellan’s amphibious Peninsula Campaign represented the most serious threat to the Confederate capital, Richmond, up to that point.

·         * The wounding in late May 1862 of General Joseph E. Johnston, at the Battle of Seven Pines, necessitated that Lee take the field himself as his replacement.

·         * Lee’s determination to take the offensive, in a series of short, savage engagements known as the Seven Days Campaign, electrified the South—even though, in strategy and long-term results, it was more flawed than many realized at the time.

Lee had many gifts—resolution, daring, an aristocratic dignity that made men look up to him in absolute loyalty—but he was gifted in nothing so much as his early Union opponents. Generals as different as John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker were nettled when he did something unexpected. The first of these commanders, McClellan, represented the most stunning example of how he could throw a Union commander way off guard.

“The Young Napoleon” had come to Washington with tremendous faith placed in him by the republic. In late 1861, he had begun raising, outfitting and training the Union’s Army of the Potomac, but still had to be prodded by President Abraham Lincoln to take the offensive against the Confederates.

The President, with good reason, wasn’t terribly keen on “Little Mac’s” eventual plan: to ship his 122,000 troops by sea to the tip of the York-James peninsula, then fight his way to Richmond. The campaign threatened to expose Washington to a Confederate attack, and one of its reasons for being—the supposed huge army obstructing the way to the rebel capital—already hinted at the tendency to see phantoms that plagued McClellan throughout the rest of his service as commander.

But Lincoln was happy at this point to get his general moving at all, and the plan did have two advantages: it exploited Union naval superiority and it sidestepped the problem of rebel concentration of forces behind interior lines, McClellan's principal objection to an overland campaign against Richmond. Lincoln, then, allowed the plan to move forward, and on March 17 McClellan began shipping his army—the largest ever to conduct an amphibious operation in North America—to Fort Monroe, guarding the way to Hampton Roads. Thus began the Peninsula Campaign, a 3½-month nightmare of feints, bad weather, muddy roads, badly coordinated attacks, and missed opportunities.

One of these was the Battle of Williamsburg, fought on May 5. Things had not been going well at all for the Federals until General Phil Kearny rallied his men with perhaps my favorite battle cry of the war: "I am a one-armed Jersey Son-of- a-Gun, follow me!"  Winfield Scott Hancock’s flanking maneuver then forced the Confederates to abandon the Wiliamsburg Line. But instead of seeing it as an opportunity to exploit, McClellan regarded it as "an accident caused by too rapid a pursuit."

Even before he assumed Johnston’s command, Lee had already made a significant contribution to the Confederate attempt to drive away the enemy. He suggested to Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson that activity in the Shenandoah Valley would make the administration in Washington fearful of an attack against the Union capital. Jackson’s lightning-fast campaign in the region made his reputation in the Confederacy.

When Johnston fell wounded, Lee faced a desperate situation. The Union seemed to be pressing the Confederacy on every front: with Ambrose Burnside in North Carolina, with Ulysses S. Grant in Tennessee, with naval control of New Orleans—and now, an enemy so close to Richmond that Davis was seriously considering withdrawing from the capital. 

Moreover, the costs of war began to come home to Richmond for the first time, with the dead and wounded being brought into the city. As Constance Cary Harrison recalled the atmosphere a half century later in Recollections Grave and Gay (1911): “During the night began the ghastly procession of wounded brought in from the field. Every vehicle the city could produce supplemented the military ambulances. Many slightly wounded men, so black with gunpowder as to be unrecognizable, came limping in on foot. All next day, women with white faces flitted bareheaded through the street and hospitals, looking for their own.”

Once taking charge in the field, Lee issued one set of orders that seemed to confirm Johnny Reb's early misimpression: to dig extensive entrenchments outside Richmond. Soldiers would rather shoot than dig, especially in the hot early-summer sun, and it wasn't long before Lee was christened "The King of Spades." But the move gave him a foothold as he began to formulate a characteristically audacious strategy. 

In addition to Jackson in the Shenandoah, Lee made effective use of another subordinate, General J.E.B. Stuart, by ordering reconnaissance of the Union forces. Stuart’s implementation of the mission was daring (he rode completely around the Union forces) and, in contrast with his later performance in the Gettysburg campaign (when he did not provide Lee with adequate knowledge of Union troop movements just before the campaign), gave the commander serviceable intelligence: McClellan’s right flank was exposed.

Beginning on June 25, Lee attempted a series of frontal assaults, along with an envelopment of the Union right. At this point, the campaign became more than a clash of thousands of men, even of creative use of the latest military technology (ironclad warships, 200-pounder rifled cannon, battlefield telegraph, and aerial reconnaissance,) but instead boiled down to a contest of two commanders’ wills.

Key to Lee’s strategy was Johnston’s perception of the early days of the Peninsula Campaign: "no one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack." In one of the great intelligence failures of Army military history, McClellan’s intelligence adviser, Allan Pinkerton (yes, future head of the famed detective agency), advised the Union leader that he was facing 200,000 men.

Lee had nothing like these forces at hand—in fact, he had about 65,000 when he took control of operations—but what he had, he would use. From June 25 to July 1, he ordered several major battles that put McClellan back on his heels--Mechanicsville, Gaines' Mill, Savage's Station, Frayser's Farm, and Malvern Hill.   

About 10 years ago, I visited the Richmond National Battlefield Park. What impressed me about the park was its sheer size. The National Park Service advises to spend 1 to 1 1/2 days to visit the site. Even this feels inadequate. In these now-peaceful rural areas, the Union and Confederate armies squared off in some of the most intense fighting of a war filled with them.

Though he won all but one of these engagements, McClellan was rattled enough to withdraw to a defensive position on the coast, from which he withdrew a month later. The entire campaign demonstrated that McClellan had, as historian Stephen W. Sears noted in his fine history of the Peninsula campaign, To the Gates of Richmond, lost “the courage to command.”

In his perceptive study, Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, the British Major General J.F.C. Fuller put the reason why Lee won so much acclaim for this campaign in as crisp a form as possible: “it was he and he alone who saved Richmond.” Immediately,  however, in the very next sentence, he qualifies that assessment: “His conceptions were brilliant, his executions faulty and unnecessarily costly.” 

In the century after the war, Ulysses S. Grant came in for much criticism as a “butcher” with his men’s lives. But it is hard to see how he can be faulted on this count more than Lee, and in another crucial respect—one that applies to the Seven Days and subsequent campaigns—he was the Confederate’s superior: Grant’s orders were crisply written, while Lee’s were oral and sometimes garbled. You'd be hard pressed to find a subordinate in any doubt what Grant wanted them to do, but Lee’s sometimes misconstrued his orders—and that can be seen in this particular campaign, when poorly coordinated Confederate attacks resulted from Lee's lieutenants not being in position to attack when he wanted them to do so.

In the confusion of war, even Lee could confuse what he wanted done. Appalled at the grim slaughter at Malvern Hill, he asked General John Magruder why he had pressed on with the attack in the face of McClellan’s strong defensive position. “Because of your orders, twice repeated,” Magruder responded. (Those Lee apologists who still blame James Longstreet for the failed Pickett’s Charge on the third, decisive day at Gettysburg might want to look to the earlier exchange with Magruder and reconsider their position.)

The talk with Magruder also raises the issue of casualties. Lee was already facing an overall numerical disadvantage in terms of manpower, and his predeliction for the grand offensive didn’t help matters. As Alan T. Nolan pointed out in Lee Considered (1991), throughout the Seven Days campaign, McClellan lost approximately 9,800 soldiers killed and wounded, or 10.7% of his force; Lee lost 19,700 men, or 20.7% of his army.

Similar numbers recurred throughout the rest of his campaigns. From McClellan through Hooker, Northern commanders were knocked so silly by Lee’s blows that they never really recovered their equilibrium after the first strike. In Grant, however, Lee faced a leader who, after agreeing with Sherman that they had had “the devil’s own day” in their first 24 hours at Shiloh, continued: “Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”

If he could, Grant would stick with his initial tactics; if not, he would try another. But, whether inVicksburg or Northern Virginia, he would continue the campaign. Lee had never faced anyone quite like him before. The losses he sustained in offensive operations now came back to haunt him, as he had no men to spare for either other fronts or even his own offensives.

In the Seven Days, Lee had driven the Army of the Potomac away from Richmond, making him the victor of the campaign. The Confederacy could ill afford his kind of bloody victories in the future, though.

Bonus Quote of the Day (A Rebel Recalls Richmond, the New Confederate Capital, 1861)

“The city was thoroughly jammed—its ordinary population of forty thousand swelled to three times that number by the sudden pressure. Of course, all the Government, with its thousand employs, had come on; and in addition, all the loose population along the railroad over which it had passed seemed to have clung to and been rolled into Richmond with it. Not only did this mania seize the wealthier and well-to-do classes, but the queerest costumes of the inland corners of Georgia and Tennessee disported themselves with perfect composure at hotels and on the streets. Besides, from ten to fifteen thousand troops were always collected, as a general rendezvous, before assignment to one of the important points-Norfolk, the Peninsula, or the Potomac lines. Although these were in camp out of town, their officers and men thronged the streets from daylight to dark, on business or pleasure bent; and the variety of uniforms — from the butternut of the Georgia private to the three stars of the flash colonel-broke the monotony of the streets pleasingly to the eye.

“Hotel accommodations in Richmond were always small and plain, and now they were all overflowing. The Spotswood, Exchange and American held beds at a high premium in the parlors, halls and even on the billiard-tables. All the lesser houses were equally packed, and crowds of guests stood hungrily round the dining-room doors at meal-times, watching and scrambling for vacated seats. It was a clear case of ‘devil take the hindmost,’ for their cuisine decreased in quantity and quality in exact ratio to augmentation of their custom.”-- Thomas C. DeLeon, Four Years in Rebel Capitals: An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy, From Birth to Death (1890)

More often than not, this blog’s discussion of history focuses on a specific person or group. But, if you’re like me, sometimes you want to see a broader canvass—i.e., not the people who made the major decisions, but how ordinary people lived in extraordinary times. Social history, if you will.

The date that gave rise to this Bonus Question of the Day—the day that Richmond, Va., was designated the capital of the Confederacy—provides just the kind of occasion needed for such a discussion.

I’ve been able to find a number of titles on the Internet by Thomas Cooper DeLeon, but far, far less about his life. What little I’ve pieced together comes from A Richmond Reader, 1733-1983, a fine anthology edited by Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan, and David J. Eicher’s The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography.

DeLeon claimed to have composed the book “almost immediately” after the war, based on extensive notes. He’s been criticized by historians for his partisan tone and occasional mistakes, but—at least judged by this section on Richmond—this account lives. Any Hollywood scenarist hoping to write about the Confederacy would do well to consult this for local color.

According to Duke and Jordan, DeLeon (1839-1914) was a journalist, novelist and Confederate officer from an important South Carolina family. In the months surrounding the outbreak of the Civil War, he served as a government clerk in Washington before throwing in his lot with the Confederacy—first moving to Montgomery, site of the provisional capital, then to Richmond.

Reading DeLeon’s lively remembrance of Richmond after the new government was transferred from the Deep South reminded me of nothing so much as a more recent history/memoir written years later: Washington Goes to War, by David Brinkley. I’m not talking simply about the striking similarities between the two authors (Southern journalists in their early 20s at the time of the events they recount, in cities below the Mason-Dixon line).

No, what I have in mind is the energetic, jostling, disruptive scene—the exponential growth—experienced by a comparatively sleepy metropolis as it swells to previously unimagined importance—not just as a government center, but as the fulcrum of a military-industrial complex.

The homefront “war” Brinkley witnessed, as a young radio reporter, was World War II. Franklin Roosevelt’s desire to make the United States the “arsenal of democracy” will sound familiar after you’ve just read the paragraphs from DeLeon: soldiers everywhere you looked, mushrooming government bureaucracies, and no vacancies whatsoever to be found at the city’s hotels. (For a comic view of the latter, watch sometime George Stevens’ wonderful 1943 romantic comedy The More the Merrier, starring Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea.) Central to this effort was the building of the Pentagon, the largest office building in the U.S. at that time.

Let’s stop for a moment to consider the issue of accommodations, because they played at least some role in Richmond’s designation as the new seat of government for the Confederacy. After only a few months in Montgomery, the representatives from the seceding states could see that the city was not for them, though the state of Alabama promised to set aside an entire tract of land for the federal district, as had been done with Washington.

Montgomery had nowhere near enough room or creature comforts for the Confederacy’s elected officials, let alone the soldiers who would have to defend it. Once the provisional government experienced the first days of a particularly muggy May, marked by particularly pesty mosquitoes, it couldn’t wait to go elsewhere.

Of all the cities contending for Confederate capital, Richmond was most able to hold an influx of people (though, as we’ve seen from DeLeon’s account, even in this instance it was strained to capacity).

And then there was the institution as vital for the Confederate war effort as the Pentagon would be for America’s in World War II: Tredegar Iron Works. Under owner Joseph R. Anderson, this private firm's foundries and machine shops switched from fabricating cannon and gun carriages for the U.S. Government to becoming “the Mother Arsenal of the Confederacy.” Of the 2,200 cannon produced by domestic sources for the Confederacy, Tredegar would account for half.

For all its advantages, however, Richmond possessed a true Achilles’ heel for the Confederacy: its proximity to Washington. “In selecting Virginia as their battleground, the rebels committed a crowning blunder,” The New York Times argued persuasively. “At Montgomery, its very remoteness would have secured to it a sort of immunity from punishment … but Virginia is not two days’ sail from the centres of population at the North.”

Only lackluster leadership in the Army of the Potomac prevented Richmond from being captured sooner. Even under the likes of Generals McClellan, Pope, Burnside and Hooker, though, Virginia was forced to endure constant invasions and battles, and Richmond held its breath, praying it could forestall the inevitable.

Four years later, as the city lay in smoke and ashes, it was crowded by a far different group: in the words of African-American minister Peter Randolph, they were liberated slaves, “running, leaping, and praising God that freedom had come at last.”

(The image accompanying this post, by the way, comes from Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 19, 1861. It shows an Alabama regiment marching through Richmond’s Capitol Square on their way to join General P.G.T. Beauregard.)

This Day in African-American History (Bojangles Taps Down Broadway on His Birthday)

May 25, 1939—To celebrate his 61st birthday, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson displayed, to the joy of astonished onlookers, the tap-dancing skills that made him a Harlem legend, capering down Broadway from Columbus Circle to 44th Street.

The same year, he demonstrated that age had hardly diminished his versatility when he appeared on Broadway and in the World’s Fair in Hot Mikado, a jazzed-up version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. His solo turn amid an all-black cast in the Michael Todd production led a Theatre Arts critic to exult, “Never … has one note been made to sing and soar, to whisper and to laugh, in such astonishingly complex rhythm.”

Baby boomers are likely to associate Robinson with the Jerry Jeff Walker-penned song “Mr. Bojangles,” which zoomed up the pop charts in a cover version by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band—then became a Las Vegas staple in the performances by the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., Neil Diamond and Tom Jones.

It might come as a surprise, then—including, as it happens, to me—that the song has nothing to do with the ground-breaking African-American entertainer. Walker wrote the poignant tune after being jailed for drunkenness in a rowdy Fourth of July celebration in the 1960s, where he met a homeless man who, at one point, demonstrated his soft-shoe instincts to his cellmate.

Those points are pertinent because a) the jail where this encounter occurred was segregated, so the homeless man/dancer was white, and b) the real Bill Robinson had died in 1949, well before this incident. The “Bojangles” of the song, then, is not a reference to the Harlem entertainer of stage and screen, but rather to an unfortunate street person whose nickname represented a tip of the hat to the late celebrity.

I just referred to “the real Bill Robinson,” but, in a sense, even that was elusive, for neither Bill nor William was his given first name at birth. “Luther”—a name he loathed—was it, so, like most entertainers, he simply reinvented himself, borrowing “William” from his younger brother.

I also called him “a Harlem legend.” He was all of that, and yet the truth was more complicated there, too.

The description that novelist Dawn Powell came up with for herself—a “permanent visitor” who made Manhattan her adopted home after coming from the Midwest—could apply equally well to Robinson. He started out in Richmond, Va., where he defied the grandmother who raised him by dancing for nickels and dimes on street corners, then proceeded to Washington, D.C., and only ended up permanently in Harlem in 1928.

If you want to start with the actuality of Bill Robinson, then turn to one of the films he made in the 1930s as Hollywood, exploiting the full possibilities of talking pictures, began to develop the movie musical. Robinson’s partner in several of these dance sequences was child star Shirley Temple, and you can see one of these in this clip from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938).

Much of Robinson’s best work, however, was done for vaudeville, an entertainment form already disappearing by the 1930s, thereby necessitating his foray into Hollywood. While plying his trade on this circuit featuring lightning-fast songs, skits, jokes and dances, the dancer impressed a future white superstar, Fred Astaire.

One of my professors at Columbia University, Ann Douglas, discusses in her book Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995) how Astaire borrowed and transformed elements of Robinson’s elegant tap style (Robinson, for instance, kept his torso rigid, while Astaire used virtually every muscle in his body). Astaire’s “Bojangles of Harlem” solo in the film Swingtime—done, admittedly, in a blackface fashion that will inevitably set off the P.C. alarms of many of today’s viewers—was meant as a sincere tribute to Robinson.

Admired by blacks and whites alike, Robinson made a great deal of money, but he probably could have made much more but for the pervasively racist age in which he lived. The compromises he had to make probably made this proud man grit his teeth.

Like Frank Sinatra, he was a fireball of an entertainer, universally acclaimed for his artistry but unnerving those who weren’t sure if they were about to encounter him at his worst (a gambling addiction, a fierce temper, and a habit of leaving his gold-plated pistol obtrusively out on a table while playing pool) or his best (an extraordinary generosity that led him to perform in 3,000 benefits).

When Robinson passed away, a decade after his delighted jaunt down Broadway, the line for the funeral procession for the “honorary mayor” of Harlem stretched for blocks.

This Day in Sports History (Arthur Ashe Wins U.S. Open)

September 9, 1968—In just one of a series of “firsts” he accomplished throughout his short life, Arthur Ashe not only won the first U.S. Open men’s singles tournament, but became—still to this day—the only African-American to do so.

Did you realize that for his accomplishment, Ashe only received $230 to cover his daily expenses at the tournament? The reason was that he still was an amateur—a second lieutenant at West Point—so the $14,000 purse went to his opponent, Tom Okker of the Netherlands.

In 1996, on what would have been his 53rd birthday, a statue of Ashe was erected by his hometown, Richmond, Va. The site, Monument Avenue, so named for the statues of Confederate war heroes, has often been called the most beautiful avenue in the United States. (I’d rate Summit Avenue of St. Paul, Minnesota, up there, too—but that’s another story.) At the time, the notion of an African-American joining Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, and Matthew Fontaine Maury in this area got some unreconstructed sons of the Confederacy bent out of shape.

For all the courage and achievements that the Confederate heroes displayed, I can’t say that I have any sympathy for opponents of the Ashe statue. As a child, Ashe would not have even been allowed to visit this area of the city because of segregation, the lingering effect of the slavery on which the Confederacy was based. His statue there helps sanitize that long-lasting stain on the American fabric.

I’m just sorry that I visited Monument Avenue in the early ‘90s, before the Ashe statue went up. If I ever get down to Richmond again, I’ll make it a point to stop there to see what I missed.

Military heroes Lee, Jackson, and Stuart were honored with equestrian statues, which tower over the viewer not simply because the statue itself is larger than life or because it is on a pediment, but because of the horse on which its rider sits. In contrast, Ashe is elevated by example. The other statues are there because of force of arms; Ashe is there by force of will.

Ashe joins Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson among my trio of sports heroes. All three were highly intelligent, deeply committed to family, and brave in the face of adversity—and, unfortunately, all three died far too young (Gehrig at 38, Ashe at 49, Robinson at 53). True, Big Bill Tilden, Babe Ruth, and Michael Jordan might have achieved more in terms of statistics in their sports than my trio. But Gehrig and Robinson made a greater impact in the larger society, and Ashe’s influence extended outside to encompass the whole world.

I’m not even going to get into his accomplishments as a tennis player. Think of everything else he accomplished outside athletics—broadcasting (commentator for ABC Sports), writing (for Time, the Washington Post and Tennis Magazine), academe (a stint teaching about black Americans in sports led to his writing the first comprehensive history on this subject in 20 years, the three-volume A Hard Road to Glory), urban affairs (the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health combats inadequate health care delivery to minorities), human rights activism (he battled apartheid in South Africa for more than 20 years), and medicine (he established the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS—the disease that took his life because of a blood transfusion).

Maybe those who cherished their Confederate heroes had a point—maybe Ashe would have been at home with someone more committed to a different cause. Like civil rights for all.

Maybe Ashe would have been in more congenial company with someone like Ulysses S. Grant, who, as President, battled with all he had, against the political odds, to bring the Ku Klux Klan to heel as the South backed away from Reconstruction. I couldn’t help think of this connection when I learned that Ashe had completed his memoir, Days of Grace, only days before his death, just as Grant had finished his autobiography—generally considered the finest memoir ever produced by a President—just before his own demise.

With keen intelligence and quiet but unswerving determination, Ashe got the most out of himself so that he could make a difference to others. As well as anyone I can think of, he personifies what Rick Warren calls “the purpose-driven life.”