The Death of General Stevenson, As the Story Goes

Brig. Gen. Thomas Greely Stevenson was “laying under a tree in the shade” —or “reclining on the grass,” depending on the account—chatting with his staff following a late breakfast. Others said it was an early lunch. In either case, all agreed there had been food involved and that Stevenson was out of harm’s way. They felt safe except for the occasional stray bullet kicking up dirt around them. “It was a part of our routine experience,” said one of Stevenson’s staffers, Edwin Rufus Lewis of the 21st Massachusetts.

It was morning, May 10, 1864, just outside Spotsylvania Court House. The IX Corps division commander had just finished an inspection of his lines and retired with his staff to finally have a meal.

Stevenson, chatting with his staff, was in the middle of issuing an order “for having proper care taken of the bodies” of dead Federal soldiers. Or, said another member of the conversation, Stevenson had “just spoken of getting some place for Headquarters which should be shady and also safe.” Whatever he was saying, he stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. Or not quite dead, not dead yet, according to other accounts. Some said “instantly,” while Lewis said “in an hour or so.” Stevenson’s adjutant, Charles Mills, said “two or three hours.”

What everyone does agree on, it seems, is that Stevenson was smoking his pipe and speaking and was in the middle of saying something when a bullet hit him in the head and cut off his speech. Then he slowly crumbled to the ground. And sometime within the span of “instantly” and “three hours,” he died.

Word quickly spread that a sharpshooter had killed him. Other rumors said it was a stray shot—a terribly unlucky, random accident.

Mills, present but not looking at the general, wrote a letter home within the hour in which he said, “Gen. Stevenson was killed this AM by a rebel sharpshooter. . . .” But Mills soon changed his assessment: “I don’t think that it was a sharpshooter, as I wrote you yesterday, but one of the occasional shots from rebel skirmishers which passed to our rear.” Several other witness accounts exist that suggest the same thing.

Stevenson’s fellow division commander Orlando Willcox reported to corps commander Ambrose Burnside that Stevenson was “hit by some chance shot,” but in his report of the battle, written on October 29, he said Stevenson “was killed by a sharpshooter.”

Burnside, in his official report of the battle, written from Providence, Rhode Island in November of 1864, recalled that Stevenson “was killed by one of the enemy’s sharpshooters.”

Grant, writing his memoirs in 1885, relayed the least reliable account. He placed Stevenson on the Po River—on the complete opposite flank of the army—involved in actions by Winfield Scott Hancock—the completely wrong corps: “General T. G. Stevenson was killed in this move.”

The sharpshooter story became dominant, I think, because it provided a rational explanation for what otherwise seemed like a random act of cruelty by the universe. “Why in heavens name could not it have selected some other spot, and even taken one of us?” Mills lamented.

A sharpshooter provides meaning, a reason, a story that makes sense. We want the world to make sense. That’s one reason we tell stories.

But as the stories around Stevenson suggest, it can be hard to get the story right. Details vary from person to person, from witness to witness, from first- to second-hand. In the old game of “Telephone,” as the message passes from speaker to listener to speaker to listener, details creep in the retelling.

As historians, we like to know who was closest in space and time to any event. Memory gets fuzzier over time, and all sorts of factors can influence a story teller, consciously and subconsciously. Second-hand accounts are never as good as first.

Stevenson’s death makes me reconsider John Sedgwick’s and, specifically, the question of whether Sedgwick died from a sharpshooter’s bullet or from random harassing fire that happened to hit him. An inscription on the Sedgwick monument at Spotsylvania says at least five Confederates claimed to be the one to fire the fatal shot—but skirmishers had been taking random potshots all morning, which is what took Sedgwick down there in the first place. Was it skill or dumb luck? Maybe Confederates “couldn’t hit an elephant intentionally at this distance.” Or maybe they could.

With Sedgwick, a sharpshooter was certainly possible. The open terrain would’ve provided a clear shot. Stevenson, by contrast, was on a series of terraces behind a ridge. A sharpshooter would’ve had to sneak behind the lines or been up in a redwood-sized tree to have a line of sight for a shot. Stevenson’s location made him a victim of descending topography, gravity, and a sharp firefight along the front.

Or so the story goes.

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For a much more detailed account of Stevenson’s death, read Chris’s essay in Fallen Leaders, part of the Emerging Civil War 10th Anniversary Series from Savas Beatie.

For more on this part of the battle, see Chris’s forthcoming book A Tempest of Iron and Lead: Spotsylvania Court House, May 8–22, 1864, available later this summer from Savas Beatie.