23
SOLDIERS ON BOTH SIDES WERE MAD FOR SOUVENIRS OF THEIR SERVICE, and the collecting mania among invading and defending armies ran the gamut from the gathering of innocent tokens from detritus-littered battlefields, to the taking of trophies of war like pistols and swords, to the vulture-like theft of valuable personal property from helpless civilians, prisoners, and even corpses.
First Lieutenant Fred Mather of the 7th New York Heavy Artillery was one such souvenir hunter. His passion was for Confederate uniform buttons, a collection that he eventually mounted on a piece of rectangular cardboard. That was how it was displayed when it was donated to the Society by the New York Commandery of the postwar veterans of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS). Judging by the handwritten descriptive notes on the display board, Mather did not particularly care whether he took the buttons from dead bodies on the battlefield or from living Confederate prisoners of war in federal custody. Included in the Mather trove are artillery and infantry buttons from casualties at Spotsylvania, and others, manufactured in locations from Birmingham, Alabama, to Waterbury, Connecticut, cut from the uniforms of enemy captives at Milford Station, Cold Harbor, Macon, and Charleston. Mather saw much action in 1864 and apparently wanted the folks back home to see evidence of it. The forced removal of the accoutrements of a uniform by an enemy guard was considered a gross humiliation to captives of the Civil War era.
PLATE 23–1
Much less is known about a collection of eleven Confederate buttons mounted on a circular blue board, donated to the Society by the 7th Regiment National Guard in 1951 (plate 23–2). Like the Mather souvenirs, these dome-shaped brass buttons came from a variety of sources, as revealed in the various stamps they bear: “North Carolina”; a map of Alabama; “Virginia/Sic Semper Tyrannis” (“Thus Ever to Tyrants”); “Texas”; and “Animis Opibusque Parati” (“Prepared in Mind and Resources”), the motto of South Carolina. But one may safely conclude they were also gathered during the final twenty-four months of the war. The heartlessness that souvenir hunting often elicited manifested itself on the Confederate side, too. When a Southerner inspected the Bull Run battlefield in 1861, he found Yankee corpses disinterred, “and their skeletons & clothing…scattered all around.” Relic hunters in search of Union buttons had dug up the graves to plunder the uniforms. Even Confederate prisoners at Andersonville did a healthy trade in buttons. The diarist Charles Wesley Homsher observed one hungry captive trading chews of tobacco for brass uniform buttons, and then, when he had gathered an even dozen, trading them to guards for a full plug of Cavendish tobacco plus two quarts of cornmeal. Guards in turn took what they called Union “Buttons with hens on” and painstakingly converted them into Confederate buttons to keep the lively, if pathetic, exchanges in full swing.
Inevitably, the lust for war booty went too far. John D. Billings, a Union veteran who served as a private under Daniel Sickles and Winfield Scott Hancock and went on to write the delightful Hardtack and Coffee; or, The Unwritten Story of Army Life in 1887, recalled that officers were at first especially hard on soldiers who did not respect Southern property rights during the first two years of fighting. “At the beginning of the war,” Billings testified, “many generals were very fearful lest some of the acts of the common soldier should give offence to the Southern people. This encouraged the latter to report every chicken lost, every bee-hive borrowed, every rail burnt, to headquarters, and subordinates were required to institute the most thorough search for evidence that should lead to the detection and punishment of the culprits, besides requiring them, to make full restitution of the value of the property taken. Our government and its leading officers, military and civil, seemed at that time to stand hat in hand, apologizing to the South for invading its sacred territory.” After 1862, however, he concluded, “this kid-glove handling of the enemy had come to an end.”
PLATE 23–2
Confederate buttons mounted on card, 1860–1865
Indeed, William T. Sherman encouraged his army to “forage liberally on the country” during its famous March to the Sea, though it was specifically admonished about entering “the dwellings of the inhabitants.” That did not prevent so-called bummers from occasionally pillaging valuables from these residences. As Billings remembered of these unfortunate civilians: “Sometimes the inhabitants were shrewd and watchful enough to scent danger and secrete the articles most precious to them till the danger was past; but not infrequently they were a little tardy in adopting such a measure, and were overhauled just before they had reached cover, and despoiled of the whole or a part of their treasure.” Souvenir hunting rarely escalated to thievery, but when it did, some contemporaries took notice. One Iowa soldier recorded in his diary: “A member of the Company by the name of Locker was arrested for letting things stick to his fingers. Capt found a revolver upon him which he lost some time ago.” The 149th New York Infantry acquired such a reputation for looting that one of its own brigade commanders admitted that the regiment “would yet steal the Southern Confederacy poor and take the shoes from off Gen. Lee’s charger” if it could.
The collecting of war souvenirs was not limited to enlisted men. During the Union occupation of New Orleans, Union soldiers reportedly appropriated so much silverware from the town’s civilian homes that their commanding officer, Benjamin F. Butler, acquired the derisive nickname “Spoons.” The Union commander in chief, Abraham Lincoln, received his share of gifts as well, including an eagle-headed cane made from wood gathered from the vicinity of the 1863 Battle of Lookout Mountain and another crafted from the hull of the once-feared Confederate ironclad Virginia. In January 1865, a delegation visiting the White House from Philadelphia gave Lincoln “a truly beautiful and superb vase of skeleton leaves gathered from the battle-fields of Gettysburg.” Lincoln responded with an appreciative little speech declaring that “so much has been said about Gettysburg, and so well said, that for me to attempt to say more may, perhaps, only serve to weaken the force of that which has already been said.” Of course by then he had already said what he wanted to say about that most famous of wartime engagements—with the Gettysburg Address. The most famous present President Lincoln ever received came in a message from William T. Sherman on December 25, 1864: “I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25000 bales of cotton.” Lincoln responded with “Many, many thanks.”
Four months later, Lincoln was dead. Pieces of his clothing, locks of his hair, and remnants from the bloodstained pillow on which his injured head rested during his final hours all became talismanic souvenirs of their own.