The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot:

The Fort Stevens Story

Benjamin Franklin Cooling III

The Scarecrow Press, 2013, 322 pp., $45.00

Review by Gordon Berg

            Every Civil War battlefield deserves a champion as passionate and learned as Frank Cooling is about the Defenses of Washington, the imposing ring of fortifications that surrounded the Union capital between 1861-1865.  Unfortunately, the remnants of those long ago defenses that still dot the urban landscape are mostly unknown and unappreciated by even the most ardent Civil War enthusiasts.

            Cooling has been studying Mr. Lincoln's forts for decades.  This, his sixth volume on the subject,  makes an eloquent case for reviving interest in them during the sesquicentennial commemoration of the war.  While not engaging in counter factual history, Cooling argues that the course of the war might have been very different had Lincoln been shot while standing on the fort's ramparts, only seven miles from the White House.

 

            Although not a major campaign by Civil War standards, the invasion staged by Confederate General Jubal Early and about 12,000 rag-tag troopers sowed anxiety and confusion in the North during the summer of 1864.  Since it was a presidential election year, the capture of Washington DC, even if only for a few days, might have changed the course of the war and prompted the election of a peace candidate in the fall.

            Cooling puts the July 11-12 engagement at Fort Stevens, the only action fought within the District of Columbia, into the larger context of the South's attempt to relieve relentless Union pressure against Richmond, Petersburg, and the once-vaunted Army of Northern Virginia.  Both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis knew chances for success were slim, but the audacity of the attempt makes the campaign worthy of study by a wider audience. 

            Nobody tells the story better than Cooling.  For the most part, he wisely uses the participants own words to move the narrative forward.  The book, therefore, is filled with interesting and arcane anecdotes about people and places; many long lost in the fog of war or in dusty archives. 

            There's Lee's pipe dream of using Early's raid to free 20,000 Confederate prisoners supposedly held at Maryland's Point Lookout prison; B&O President John W. Garrett's determination to save his railroad from destruction; the delaying action fought on the banks of the Monocacy River by disgraced Union General Lew Wallace that might have saved Washington; Lincoln's almost child-like determination to see a real fire fight; and the curious coalition of 100-day volunteers, convalescing soldiers, and government workers hastily rounded up to defend Fort Stevens until the timely arrival of Sixth Corps veterans.  Their story makes for a colorful, off the beaten path, Civil War tale.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

James M. Williams:
Civil War General and Indian Fighter

Robert W. Lull

University of North Texas Press, 2013, 290 pp., $24.95

Review by Gordon Berg

            July 1863 saw significant Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Cabin Creek that made the careers of George G. Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, and James M. Williams.  Never heard of the battle of Cabin Creek?  That's probably because it was fought by just a few thousand Federals and Confederates on the banks of a muddy stream near the Grand River in northeastern Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).  Never heard of James M. Williams?  Read Robert W. Lull's assiduously researched, energetically written biography and learn about the trail-blazing Union commander of the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry serving in the Trans-Mississippi.

            James Williams arrived in Leavenworth to open a dry goods store just as the blood began to flow along the Kansas-Missouri border.  He got to know James H. Lane and his band of abolitionist Jayhawkers.  Williams soon exchanged his clerk's apron for a Navy Colt and a Sharp's rifle.  According to Lull, “Lane swept Williams up in his organization” and, by the outbreak of the Civil War, “Williams was a veteran commander and an unreserved subscriber to the Federal cause.”

            After Kansas was admitted to the Union, Lane, now a U.S. Senator, advocated using African Americans and Indians as soldiers.  He liberally interpreted the Militia Act of July 1862 as authorizing just that and sent Williams around the state to recruit black men, most of them former slaves, into Kansas state regiments.  Lane rewarded Williams' efforts by making him commander of the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry.

            The Civil War west of the Mississippi River was, for the most part, a continuation of the guerrilla warfare practiced between 1856-1861: quick-hitting, savage, and often personal.  On October 29, 1862, the First Kansas got its baptism of fire before it was officially mustered into Federal service in a tall grass prairie field on the Toothman farm near the Marais des Cygnes River.  The regiment suffered eight dead and eleven wounded.  

            Later, a larger engagement at Island Mound, the men Williams had trained proved their worth in battle.  According to Lull, they “functioned as a team, maneuvered professionally, and responded quickly to orders.”  Island Mound was a Union victory, the first for a black regiment against organized Confederate troops.  The regiment would fight at Honey Springs in the Indian Territory, Poison Spring in Arkansas, and numerous skirmishes rarely found in history books.  When the war ended, Williams commanded six regiments of United States Colored Troops brigaded together as part of the VII Corps before mustering out in October 1865.

            The end of the Civil War did not end the military career of James M. Williams.  Commissioned a captain in the Eighth U.S. Cavalry, Williams went west to fight Indians.  Lull points out that about 600 men “were responsible for national security and civil protection over an area of 558,069 untracked square miles of what would become six different states.”   After being severely wounded, Williams began his third career as a successful Colorado rancher until he died in 1907.

            Lull's book is important because it highlights the importance of African American troops in the Trans-Mississippi, a region still insufficiently studied by historians of the Civil War.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.