No Disgrace to My Country

The Life of John C. Tidball

Eugene C. Tidball

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631011528
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías militares

This exhaustive study chronicles the life of career army officer John C. Tidball, from action in major Civil War battles to postwar service in the West.

Beginning with the first Battle of Bull Run, Tidball, saw action in nearly all the major engagements in the Eastern Theater, including Chancellorsville, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, and Petersburg.

Using previously unpublished wartime letters and memoirs, Eugene C. Tidball captivates the reader with the story of his most famous relatives years in service to his country. Tidballs account extends beyond the Civil War, to include recounting his presence at the Supreme Courts delivery of the Dred Scott decision; his commanding of the military District of Alaska; his traversing the Southwest in 1853 as a member of the 35th Parallel Pacific Railway Survey; and his service as aide-de-camp to General-in-Chief William Tecumseh Sherman.

PART ONE

The Old Army

CHAPTER ONE

Growing Up

“I became my own preceptor.”

AS THE SECOND quartile of the nineteenth century dawned, John Caldwell Tidball, like the president he was to serve so well in the Civil War, was born in a log cabin. The date was January 25, 1825, and the place was a farm in the rugged hills of Wheeling Creek, in western Virginia. “Tidball” is an English name, derived from the ancient appellation Theobald, meaning “bold man.” By the end of his long life—he was born during the presidency of James Monroe and lived to see Teddy Roosevelt inaugurated—no one could doubt that the name fit this intrepid soldier.

His mother was Maria Caldwell, whom he remembered in his memoirs as “naturally refined and of pleasing manners, and withal a very beautiful woman: tall, straight and agile of fine figure, with light brown hair, hazel eyes and fair ruddy complexion. She was a refined specimen of the Scotch-Irish type from which she had sprung.” His father, William, was born in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in 1796; he received a good common school education and, his son wrote, “possessed a good clear mind and a wonderfully retentive memory, combined with close reasoning faculties.” William Tidball started out to make his own way through life as a youth, engaging in whatever occupation presented itself and going wherever he could find employment. Thirsty for knowledge, he supplemented his school education with as much reading as time allowed—“chiefly of a staid and solid character, for the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians among whom he had been brought up abhorred light and airy literature.” In this way he acquired enough useful knowledge to allow him to engage in school teaching.

As a young man William drifted down into the panhandle of Virginia, now West Virginia, and settled down near the town of Wheeling, where his half-uncle, Dr. Brownhill Tidball practiced medicine. With him, in about 1820, he began to study medicine, but he soon became distracted by the sister-in-law of the doctor, a young woman named Maria Caldwell, whom he began to court. The Caldwell family, wrote John, “estimated his sterling qualities at their true value, and were not averse to his marriage to their daughter.” He was twenty-four and she was two months shy of seventeen on April 2, 1822, when she came to him, without dowry other than a horse, a cow or two, a few pigs and chickens, and a few household effects. “Buoyed by love and stout hearts,” they started their new life in the log cabin that was to become the birthplace of their son.

This beginning of the story of William Tidball and his wife was written by their son John eighty years after his parents were married. He was by then seventy-seven years old and had retired after more than forty years in the U.S. Army. The account is in a bound volume entitled “Genealogy” found among his papers at his death. By the time he set down this account of his father’s early years, he had already described his career as an army artillerist in his own memoirs—memoirs that tell us much about what we know of his life as a professional soldier but that are nearly devoid of references to his mother, father, sisters, and children. He limited his memoirs to an account of his army career, consciously and scrupulously excluding references to his family life, much in the way of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and other military officers of the time. Then, late in life, perhaps casting about for something to occupy his restless mind, he took an interest in genealogy and began conducting research for the purpose of compiling a family history. His interest in the subject originated during a visit with his father not long before his father’s death, when their conversation chanced to turn upon their family genealogy. He noted down much of the information his father imparted to him and with this incentive decided to pursue the matter still further. “This manuscript or book,” he wrote, referring to the bound volume mentioned earlier, “is the onset of the clues that he gave me.” The first twenty or so pages in the book constitute a detailed family tree, tracing his family back to Thomas Tidball, who arrived in Philadelphia by ship in 1714 from the Bristol Channel. When his research took him up to his father’s generation, the momentum carried him on, and he started writing an account of his father’s life, which necessarily included a description of his own years at home before he left for West Point. Thus, it is happenstance, due purely to his interest in genealogical research, that we have this account of his growing up.

The year John Tidball was born, James Monroe was just completing his one-term presidency, but the dominant influence of the next two decades would be Andrew Jackson, who was elected president in 1828 and who ushered in the age of Jacksonian Democracy, the era into which John Tidball was born and in which he grew up. Although in some ways an ambiguous and controversial concept, Jacksonian Democracy was an authentic political movement; its basic thrust was to favor a more broadly based democracy, the abolition of property requirements for voting and office holding, low tariffs, states rights, and relief from creditors. But there was also a contradiction in Jacksonian philosophy. So insistent were its adherents on the equality of white men, that they tended to take racism for granted: the Jacksonians’ rationale for territorial expansion assumed that Indians were lesser people, and few of Jackson’s adherents had qualms about black enslavement. By the 1850s, these contradictions unraveled the Jacksonian coalition, but it was a dominant as well as a divisive political and social force during John Tidball’s formative years.¹

John’s family lived near Wheeling Creek until he was five, but many years later he still retained a shadowy recollection of the log cabin and of visiting, while living there, his grandfather, who lifted him up to the curb of a deep well and allowed him to look down “with wonder and delight at his reflection in the water below.” John’s mother often visited her Caldwell relations in Wheeling, where they were leading citizens; it was from these relations that, John thought, she absorbed her ideas of refinement and propriety. She had had a fair start at schooling but had to abandon any educational aspirations after moving to the wild regions of Wheeling Creek; she fully shared her husband’s ambition to improve their worldly situation and to rise above the poverty that overshadowed their start in life. “This they assayed to accomplish not by any bold stroke of adventurous speculation, but by slow degrees in the exercise of industry and frugality.” In pursuit of this idea, in 1830 they moved John and his two sisters, Maria and Sarah, and their few worldly possessions twenty-five miles westward to a rented farm in Belmont County, Ohio.

This was the year after the National Road was extended through that region. As John remembered, it passed through their farm, their comfortable hewed-log house standing by its side. The National Road, later called the Cumberland Road, had been first proposed by Albert Gallatin, who convinced Congress in 1802, when it was considering the admission of Ohio into the Union, to set aside one-tenth of the proceeds of land sales within the boundaries of the new state for the building of roads from the Atlantic seaboard to the Ohio Valley. The road reached Wheeling in 1818 and Columbus in 1833. This was the period of the great immigration to what was then the Northwest, and young John could sit by the roadside and watch the stream of emigrants upon the National Road, like the movement of an army filing by, seeking a better life to the West. They came in swarms—most of them were from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and other states of the East. But some also came directly from Europe, particularly from Germany, and day after day he would observe those people, “who in curious costume trooped along on foot, men, women and children—the latter seemingly innumerable.”² “Huge Conestoga wagons, with their six powerful horses slowly rumbled by, carrying merchandise to regions still farther to the westward. Stages there were in abundance. These were of the old English, thoroughfare type, drawn by four horses, the driver of which was a marvel of skill in the handling of his reins and the use of his whip. All of these sights made a deep impression on my boyish mind. The traffic upon this road afforded profitable markets to residents along its route. In this my father shared and enjoyed a taste of prosperity.”

Thus, six-year-old John had a front row seat to what one historian called “one of the marvelous phenomena of history”—the migration from the thirteen old states and from European countries to the Mississippi Valley. In 1790, 94 percent of the four million Americans lived in the original thirteen states. By 1820 practically one-quarter of the population of nine and a half million people lived beyond the western limits of the Atlantic seaboard and, in 1850, 45 percent of the twenty-three million inhabitants of the United States lived there.³

The Tidball family resided on this farm for a couple of years; meanwhile, an enterprising easterner name Hendry purchased an adjoining farm, staked it off into town lots, set up a steam-driven mill, and called the place Hendrysburg. The National Road was soon studded with villages of a similar kind. In this newborn hamlet of Hendrysburg, William Tidball bought a lot—the first land he ever owned—and on it built a comfortable frame house and, adjoining it, a store. As a very young man he had had some experience as an assistant in a country store and had developed a taste for this kind of business. As his own master, he soon developed some aptitude as a merchandiser. They moved into their new house, and John’s father continued operating his little store—this was in 1832—but the following year his mother became ill. “Consumption,” John wrote many years later, “which had proved fatal to several of my mother’s sisters, was rapidly making its way into the vitality of my mother.” As a consequence, in 1833 they went to New Castle, Pennsylvania, and moved in with his father’s family.⁴

It was at New Castle, “when he was a delicate flaxen-haired lad of only six or seven,” that his strict Presbyterian environment tested him. The Tidballs lived in a neighborhood of Scotch Presbyterians and Covenanters—Roundheads of the most austere type. “They were in this respect worse if possible than Macauley’s anti-bear-baiting Puritans. They never smiled, and as to jovial thoughts, these they banished from their minds as inspirations from the devil. Aside from this strained austerity, and certain queer customs, they were good citizens—thrifty, industrious and honest. One of these queer customs was that each of them was authorized to flog the children of the rest whenever they caught them doing anything of which they did not approve, and this gradually embraced about everything children want to do.”

This custom was in fact an unwritten law, not only acquiesced in by parents but encouraged by them as a righteous way of checking sin. John’s parents, although more enlightened and more liberal than most of the congregation, were forced by public opinion to yield to the custom. A man named Crawford was precentor of the church they attended, where they listened to “foreordination sermons and long winded prayers from early morn to dewy eve.” This position gave Crawford “extra executive privileges”; the one John thought he most valued was that of chastising all urchins unlucky enough to fall in his way. John and his chum Jake, “after a long day of weariness” attending Sunday school and the morning and afternoon sermons, strolled to an open field where they found a service tree full of delicious berries, not to be resisted by any boy of normal appetite. While they were plucking and eating the fruit, John, who was up in the tree filling his hat with berries at this point, looked downward and, much to his consternation, saw Crawford at the front of the tree, cutting off every avenue of escape.

As I slid down the tree Crawford wrenched some sprouts from the roots of it, and drawing them through his hand to strip them of their leaves, seized me by the collar, and commenced a sermon on the sin of sabbath-breaking. It was the play of a cat with a mouse before drowning it. I whimpered and endeavored to make excuses, and tried to placate him by offering him the berries in my hat, but to no purpose; he kicked my hat away, and began flagellating me without mercy. Between each few strokes he paused to quote some apposite passage of scripture. Being warm June weather, my clothing was scanty and my legs bare, and every twig told its tale upon my tender skin. Jake, the heroic fellow, slipped up behind, gave him a sound pelt with a stone and fled, drawing away my inhumane scourger after him, thus enabling me to escape.⁵

As we shall see, John Tidball was not one to forget an insult; many years later, seeking to avenge this vividly remembered wrong, he would track down his assailant. This incident, and his strict upbringing generally, indelibly marked his personality and outlook, and strongly influenced the man John Tidball was to become. Historian James Morrison believes that “it was this experience which created the taciturnity, the sternness, and the austerity which sometimes unnerved his subordinates in later years and which successfully camouflaged a lively sense of humor from all but his most intimate associates. However, the same experience also produced the flinty integrity and the unswerving devotion to duty which were equally Tidball’s hallmarks as a soldier.”⁶

On the night of Saturday, January 25, 1834, on John’s ninth birthday, his mother died; his father buried her in a little burying ground he had laid out on the small farm that he had purchased near Hendrysburg. In the spring of 1834, John and his father returned from New Castle to their homestead in Hendrysburg. Strong family ties brought his father’s sister Jane along to manage their little household. Illnesses and early deaths were frequent in the mid-eighteenth century, and those with families nearby to assist them through these crises were fortunate indeed. As William’s parents helped him by taking in his family during the illness of his wife, and as his sister aided him upon his wife’s death, he would later come to his son’s assistance. During the Civil War the untimely death of John’s wife would leave his sons without a home, and he would send them to his father’s farm in Ohio, where the old man cared for them for many years.

William Tidball, with his “good common school education” and brief career as a schoolmaster, obviously cared about his children’s schooling. Had they gone farther West, the opportunities would have been scarce, but Ohio was even at this early time known for its progressive educational policies; along with Indiana, it had made the most progress in the nation toward a free school system in the first half of the century. Professor Calvin E. Stowe of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, who married Harriet Beecher, seems to have given the primary stimulus to establishment of common schools in Ohio. After investigating European school systems, in 1836 he delivered a report to the Ohio legislature recommending the German system of education. His recommendation was adopted, and the free common school system of Ohio was adopted in 1837. Precisely how much John Tidball would later benefit from the professor’s labors is unclear, but in 1834 in Hendrysburg, the opportunities were insufficiently attractive to bring his sisters, Sarah and Maria, back there; they stayed in New Castle where they would have better opportunities for schooling. As for John, he was needed on the farm.⁷

John’s father reestablished his little store in Hendrysburg but gave most of his time to the improvement of a small farm—about one hundred acres—which he had found means to purchase near the village where they continued to reside. The care of the store was given to a young man whom his father was training to the mercantile business. The farm, which had been the dower of a widow, had for many years been running down; the fences were in a state of decay, and rank willows lining the creek that meandered through the rich bottomland had almost captured this valuable portion of the acreage. But with the assistance of two or three hired men his father soon gave things a more prosperous aspect. His father, John wrote,

was untiring at labor and leading the way got the most possible out of those about him. His first care, when the spring fairly opened, upon our return from Newcastle, was to plant an orchard. He and I did this ourselves and in this I took my first lesson at farm work. This was when I was but a few months turned into my ninth year. From that time on until I left home in 1844 to go to West Point I took many more lessons in farming, and severe lessons they were too, for my father, energetic as he himself was, allowed me but few holidays. My winters were devoted to schooling; but even then the mornings and evenings were crowded with work, feeding and caring for the livestock of which my father soon acquired quite a lot.

His father exercised great care in selecting the fruit trees for the orchard, and when the trees came to bearing, there were no such apples to be found in all that part of the country. More than sixty years later some of the trees were still standing and bearing the fruit of old age. John never visited that region without going to see those reminders of his earliest farm labor.

Occasionally his father allowed him part of a day for fishing, or hunting with a “good old-fashioned rifle” as soon as he was old enough to carry it. He remembered “right well did I learn to use it in bringing down squirrels from the tops of the huge trees of that region.” When his father purchased the farm it was without buildings, and he soon began to build a house together with a barn and stables. The house was of bricks made in a nearby brickyard. “In all of this labor I took a part although so very young.” John recalled, “I can conscientiously assert that I handled every brick, at least once, that entered into the construction of that house.” He also assisted the carpenters in buildi...