Posted on 10/22/2002 12:04:52 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
Patrick Cleburne was one of the great Confederate generals of the Civil War, but he wasn't an astute army politician, Civil War author Wiley Sword said Monday.
Cleburne twice told a superior he should resign and made the unpopular proposal to enlist Southern blacks into the Confederate Army.
Sword, a nationally known author, will speak Wednesday at the monthly meeting of the Civil War Roundtable of Eastern Kansas.
Cleburne was one of the "finest divisions commanders" in the Confederate Army, Sword said during a Monday interview by phone from his home in Georgia.
At the battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in April 1862, Brig. Gen. Cleburne, a brigade commander, attacked the camps of Union Gen. William T. Sherman. From that battle, a Union victory, Cleburne learned he should always examine the ground before he attacked over it and not to attack an enemy artillery unit firing canister.
"It was like a gigantic shotgun. It could be particularly devastating," Sword said. Cleburne recruited a battalion of his best shots to pick off enemy artillerymen in future fights, Sword said.
Cleburne might have won higher rank except for two factors. When his superior, Gen. Braxton Bragg, asked subordinates to critique his leadership, Cleburne twice told him Bragg hadn't accomplished what he could have and that he should resign, Sword said.
In early 1864, he urged the Confederate Army to recruit black slaves into the Confederate Army with the provision they would be free once they served. Cleburne thought blacks would fight for the South, but Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, turned down the Cleburne proposal although he tried the idea late in the war.
"I think there would be a fair number of black soldiers" who would have fought for the South because many blacks had bonds with the families they served and under that system, they knew they had homes and food, Sword said.
Cleburne, who served in the British Army until he migrated to the United States, has been called the "Stonewall Jackson of the West," referring to the extremely popular Jackson of the war's eastern theater. Had he served in the east, Gen. Robert E. Lee would have recognized Cleburne's talent and wouldn't have held him back, Sword said.
Cleburne's life ended at the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., in November 1864 when Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood ordered him to make a "suicidal charge" across two miles of open ground against a fortified Union position, Sword said. Cleburne, 36, who wouldn't order his men to do what he himself wasn't willing to do, personally participated in the attack and was killed at the Union breastworks fighting with his soldiers, Sword said.
At Shiloh, Union and Confederate commanders suffered random fates. Sidney Albert Johnston, a very able Confederate general, was mortally wounded when a random shot fired by his own troops struck him, Sword said.
Union generals Sherman, who was in the thick of much fighting, was wounded in the hand and had several horses shot from under him, and Ulysses Grant, who was struck in the sword by an enemy round, survived the battle and the war.
Sword's books include "Southern Invincibility: A History of the Confederate Heart," "The Confederacy's Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville," "Shiloh: Bloody April," "Mountains Touched with Fire: Chattanooga Besieged, 1863" (with Albert E. Castel) and "Sharpshooter: Hiram Berdan, His Famous Sharpshooters and Their Sharps Rifles."
Sword, 64, who had Union and Confederate soldiers in his family history, lived much of his life in Michigan and eventually moved to Suwanee, Ga., about 30 miles northeast of Atlanta. He is working on a revised version of "Shiloh: Bloody April," a monograph about the Henry repeating rifle, magazine articles and researching the Atlanta Campaign.
Steve Fry can be reached at (785) 295-1206 or sfry@cjonline.com.
• Who: Author Wiley Sword
• When: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday
• Where: Education classroom at the Kansas Museum of History, 6425 S.W. 6th.
• What: Monthly meeting of the Civil War Roundtable of Eastern Kansas.
Program is open to the public. Admission is free.
(To the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas", sung by the survivors of the Army of Tennessee on its retreat after the Battle of Nashville)
Shot in the sword? Ouch!
"Ouch, dammit, I don't have a scabbard!"
"You do now."
Although, to be truthful, anything was possible in that forested melee.
The affair at the Shelton House is little documented since it was such an embarrassment to the North. Ironically, on Cleburnes' headstone are his battle honors, Chicamauga, Shiloh, Murphreesboro, Franklin, Perryville, and Shelton House.
His proper place would have been a few hundred yards behind his division (where he might, in fact, have remained mounted), but civil war division commanders occasionally got carried away and got too far forward.
Just curious.
The south had a propensity for shooting their own generals. Jackson, Hill, and Johnston were killed and Longstreet was wounded, all by Confederate bullets.
I've never heard of Sword but the Albert Castel connection makes sense. He has had a lot of his stuff published through the University of Kansas press. His "Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign on 1864" is probably the most definitive book on that campaign that you'll find.
That fast food will get you every time.
Franklin is probably the biggest battlefield I've not yet visited. I know the developers have gotten most of it. Is there much left to see?
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