A Gunner in Lee's Army

The Civil War Letters of Thomas Henry Carter

Graham T. Dozier, Graham T. Dozier

• Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469618753
• Thema: History
• Thema: American Civil War History

In May 1861, Virginian Thomas Henry Carter (1831–1908) raised an artillery battery and joined the Confederate army. Over the next four years, he rose steadily in rank from captain to colonel, placing him among the senior artillerists in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. During the war, Carter wrote more than 100 revealing letters to his wife, Susan, about his service. His interactions with prominent officers--including Lee, Jubal A. Early, John B. Gordon, Robert E. Rodes, and others--come to life in Carter's astute comments about their conduct and personalities. Combining insightful observations on military operations, particularly of the Battles of Antietam and Spotsylvania Court House and the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign, with revealing notes on the home front and the debate over the impressment and arming of slaves, Carter's letters are particularly interesting because his writing is not overly burdened by the rhetoric of the southern ruling class. Here, Graham Dozier offers the definitive edition of Carter's letters, meticulously transcribed and carefully annotated. This impressive collection provides a wealth of Carter's unvarnished opinions of the people and events that shaped his wartime experience, shedding new light on Lee's army and Confederate life in Virginia.

Chapter One: Life before the War

Thomas Henry Carter was born in 1831 at Pampatike, the King William County, Virginia, plantation of his parents, Thomas Nelson Carter and Juliet Muse Gaines Carter. Tom, as the family knew him, was named after his father and his maternal grandfather and was the second son and the third of four children. The Carters occupied a prominent position among the leading families in Virginia. John Carter, the first of that name to arrive in Virginia, came from England sometime before his election to the colony’s House of Burgesses in 1642, in which he represented Upper Norfolk (later Nansemond) County. That same year, he received a grant of land in Lancaster County, where he established the family seat of Corotoman. By the 1660s, John Carter had amassed more than 4,000 acres through grants, purchases, and patents. With large land ownership came an increase in social prominence and political power, culminating in his election to the governor’s council in 1658.¹

As high as John Carter and his wife, Sarah Ludlow Carter, rose, however, no member of the family would match the accomplishments of their son Robert. Born around 1664, Robert Carter followed in his father’s footsteps, serving as a commander in the local militia and representing Lancaster County in the House of Burgesses. From 1699 to 1705, Robert was treasurer of the colony, and from 1700 until his death in 1732, he served on the governor’s council. Where Robert differed from his father—and what established his place in Virginia history—was in his passion for acquiring land. Like his father, he accumulated acreage through grants, purchases, and patents, but the amounts varied tremendously. In Robert’s time, vast stretches of land between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers became available in what was known as the Northern Neck Proprietary. Robert acquired at least 295,000 acres of land in the Northern Neck by the time of his death. The political power he wielded and the vast wealth he accumulated through land ownership, tobacco farming, and other ventures earned him the apt nickname of “King” Carter.²

The Carter family remained politically prominent throughout the eighteenth century. “King” Carter’s son John and grandson Charles both served on the governor’s council and managed the vast estates inherited from their illustrious predecessor, including the James River plantation known as Shirley that John II and his wife, Elizabeth Hill, built by 1738. Charles Carter owned more than 13,000 acres in thirteen counties and at least 710 slaves. Like his grandfather, he represented Lancaster County in the House of Burgesses. Charles remained in that body until the outbreak of the American Revolution. Marriage to his second wife, Ann Butler Moore, resulted in the birth of several children, including son Robert Carter in 1774.³

Robert chose a different path than his ancestors. His father gave to him one of the many Carter family properties, a plantation in King William County called Pampatike. The 1,200-acre farm on the north bank of the Pamunkey River promised a prosperous life for Robert. As much as he may have wanted to follow in the tradition of his family, however, Robert was never comfortable with the institution of African slavery. In a letter to his children, written in 1803, he stated: “I conceive a strong disgust to the slave trade and all its barbarous consequences. This aversion was not likely to be diminished by becoming a slaveholder and witnessing many cruelties.” Instead of managing Pampatike, Robert Carter pursued a medical career. He studied under Dr. Benjamin Rush and received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1803. Nine years earlier, in 1794, he had married Mary Nelson, a union that enhanced the well-established Carter dynasty. Her father, Thomas Nelson of Yorktown, Virginia, was a planter, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and governor of Virginia following Thomas Jefferson. At Shirley on 8 October 1800, Mary gave birth to her second son and fourth child, Thomas Nelson Carter.⁴

The future father of Thomas Henry Carter grew up among his Carter relatives at Shirley and in northern Virginia. Tragedy, however, intruded early in Thomas’s life. In 1803 his mother died shortly after she and Robert returned to Virginia from Philadelphia. Two years later, Thomas’s father, who had largely been absent studying medicine in Europe, died shortly after returning home on 14 November 1805 at the age of thirty-one. A few bits of parental guidance that Thomas received from his father survive in a letter Robert wrote to his children, in which he advised that they “be humane to [their] slaves and dependants” and that they “consider ardent spirits as one of the greatest moral and physical evils with which it has ever pleased God to inflict man.” Following his father’s death, Thomas became the ward of a relative, William Carter. He attended schools at Kinloch, the Turner family home in Fauquier County, Virginia, and at Moffett’s near Richmond. Family tradition maintains that he went to Princeton College but remained there only one night before returning home, and that he entered the U.S. Navy only to resign shortly thereafter. After traveling through the Deep South because he was “uneasy about his lungs,” Thomas returned home, where he met Juliet Muse Gaines, a young woman who taught at a school at Aylett’s, not too far from Pampatike. The couple married in 1824. Her grandfather, Henry Gaines, from whom Thomas Henry Carter derived his middle name, represented King and Queen County in the Virginia General Assembly during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Juliet’s sister Cornelia, who lived with the Carters, believed that “whatever sense or intellect [the Carter children] had was inherited from the Gaines family.”⁵

A reserved man, Thomas Carter spent most of his life dedicated to the practice of farming. Pampatike thrived in the 1830s under his management. It nearly doubled in size to 2,250 acres after he bought Goodwin’s Island on the Pamunkey and had a dam built along the river to reclaim swampy land. Like fellow farmer Edmund Ruffin, Carter experimented with a variety of fertilizing methods to produce a healthy crop of corn and wheat. In this atmosphere of prosperity, Thomas and Juliet had four children. Thomas Henry Carter, the couple’s third child, was born at Pampatike on 13 June 1831. Events beyond King William County that year would help shape the world that Tom Carter would inhabit and crystallize the issues that would divide the nation thirty years later: William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of the Liberator, which became the “most prominent voice” of the abolition movement; Virginian Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper, which almost overnight made wheat farming more profitable and further fueled the demand for more slave labor; and Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton County shocked white Virginians and resulted in tighter controls over the enslaved population.⁶

Though Tom Carter would spend the majority of his life at Pampatike, his earliest residence there ended abruptly when he was four years old. Like his father, Tom lost a parent when he was very young. In 1834 Juliet Carter died, leaving her four small children without their mother. Realizing that he could not manage his large plantation and raise his children, Thomas Nelson Carter found someone to fill the role left by his wife’s death. A year after losing Juliet, he married Anne Willing Page, the daughter of William Byrd Page and Evelyn Byrd Nelson Page of Clarke County, Virginia. Known as “Sweet Anne,” she was described as “attractive in every way, in mind, character, and appearance.” The family lived briefly at Pampatike, but by 1840 they had moved to Clarke County after Thomas Carter purchased Annfield, a late Georgian-style stone house situated on a 216-acre farm near Berryville, Virginia.⁷

At Annfield, where he later claimed he “learned to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth,” young Tom Carter grew up around his extended family, which, by virtue of many years of Carter family marriages, included the Armisteads, Burwells, Randolphs, Byrds, Pages, Grymeses, Tayloes, and Lees. He attended schools with friends and family members in Clarke County at Mt. Airy, the Burwell family home, and at Clay Hill, the nearby plantation of Francis Beverley Whiting. Whiting had established his school for his own children but had welcomed Tom Carter and other children from the neighborhood.⁸

In the fall of 1846, Carter matriculated to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a military college located in Lexington that had been founded seven years earlier on the site of a state arsenal. Though regulations stated that no entering cadet could be under the age of sixteen, Tom Carter had just celebrated his fifteenth birthday in June. In addition, rather than graduate in 1850 with the rest of the first-year (or Fourth Class) cadets who entered in 1846, Carter was placed with the second-year (or Third Class) cadets, who would graduate in 1849. The principal professor of the institute did have the authority to exempt qualified students from attending first-year classes. Precisely why Tom Carter was permitted to enter VMI a year early and as a second-year student is not known. Most likely it is attributable to a combination of family connections and the quality of his Clarke County education.⁹

Cadet Carter and his classmates underwent a strict combination of academic and military training. In his first year, he studied mathematics (algebra and geometry), French, and landscape drawing. French turned out to be Carter’s strongest subject and math his weakest. At the end of his first year, he stood fourteenth out of a class of thirty-five. The school day at VMI consisted of classes from 8:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. and again from 2:00 to 3:30 P.M. After 4:00 P.M., the cadets assembled on the drill field for their military education, which mostly consisted of drill, inspection, and marching. The strict regimen left cadets with little time of their own. That is not to say that they could not find ways to engage in social activities. Carter later remembered how he and his fellow cadets “delighted” to attend the Reverend William White’s Presbyterian church in Lexington “rather more, I fancy, to see the pretty girls that there did most frequent, than to hear his godly admonitions.”¹⁰

When Cadet Carter returned for his second year, he did so starting in July 1847 with the annual summer encampment, during which cadets experienced what amounted to basic training. They lived in tents on the drill field and spent their days learning to handle arms, engage in small-unit drills, and practice the care and firing of artillery pieces. Academic classes began again in September. Carter’s courses in his second year included more math (analytical geometry and calculus), Latin, drawing (topographical), and mechanics. This time, his strongest subject proved to be drawing and his weakest mechanics. Carter’s records also indicate that he received no demerits for poor conduct. Either he was an exceptionally well-behaved cadet or he knew how to avoid getting caught. In any case, at the end of the term, Tom Carter had improved his class rank by three, finishing eleventh out of twenty-eight cadets.¹¹

During his time at VMI, Carter shared the classroom and barracks with cadets who were either engaged in current U.S. military service or would later see Confederate service. While he and his fellow cadets marched and drilled in Lexington, the United States was at war with Mexico. On 14 April 1847, the corps gathered to witness “a national salute of thirteen guns” that were fired in honor of recent American victories in Mexico. The occasion was all the more poignant because twenty-six former and a few current cadets were then serving in Mexico. Three members of Carter’s class took part in the war, including Benjamin Franklin Ficklin, future Confederate soldier and a founder of the Pony Express. Of the fifty-one cadets who matriculated into the class of 1849, thirty-five would later serve in the Confederate army or navy. Samuel Garland Jr., the third-ranking member of the class, would achieve the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army and die at the Battle of South Mountain. Several of Carter’s professors would also fight for the Confederacy, including Francis Henney Smith, John Quincy Marr, Raleigh E. Colston, and Robert Emmet Rodes. Carter’s own Confederate service would be closely linked throughout the war with Rodes.¹²

Tom Carter’s final year at VMI began shortly after he turned seventeen. The courses he took reflected a much heavier emphasis on militaryrelated subjects. They included military and civil engineering, tactics (infantry and artillery), and math (optics and astronomy). Other First Class subjects included French, Latin, drawing, natural philosophy (physics), chemistry, and rhetoric. Carter finished with his highest marks in French and struggled most in tactics, which is ironic considering his later abilities as a Confederate artillerist. On 4 July 1849, Tom Carter graduated eighth out of a class of twenty-four cadets.¹³

Carter returned to Clarke County after his graduation, apparently not finished with his education. At some point duri...