A Gory Account Without Glory: Futility and Humility in the Last Days of Lee’s Army

Henry Bahnson lamented that few privates chronicled their time in the war. “The glowing accounts of battles and campaigns have nearly always been written by the general officers, or by non-participants who style themselves historians. It seems hardly fair that we privates should be entirely ignored; be-cause, without us, there would have been no generals, nor would there have been a war to write about.”[1] Distinguishing his essay from Maj. Gen.John B. Gordon’s similarly named lecture, Bahnson clarified, “[any] discrepancy is doubtless due to the fact that we looked at events from different standpoints. The General rode on horseback and I went afoot.”[2]

Bahnson’s account of the Appomattox Campaign and his return home is half hellacious, gruesome, forthright, and evocative, the other half standoffish, witty, and chiding. This narrative is a direct refutation of the rose-colored glasses memoirs of glory, pride, and unwavering commitment to the cause. Tales of personal gallantry are omitted in favor of spectacles of gore that would be at home in Saving Private Ryan. Bahnson elicits the numbness felt while marching on for lack of better alternatives, for self-preservation, and for what little comfort a man might find elbow-to-elbow with his comrades in arms.

At only nineteen pages, this quick page-turner offers revelatory insight into the realities of combat. Soldiers often practiced self-censorship in letters and diaries for many reasons, wishing to spare their loved ones from grotesque scenes, adhering to conventions of writing, and seeking to preserve their masculine image.[3] Bahnson intentionally bucks these trends and recounts each vivid detail seemingly inextricable from his mind.

Henry Bahnson was born in 1845 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to a Moravian father who relocated the family to Salem, North Carolina in 1849. Henry enrolled in the Moravian College and Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania when he came of age. He paused his studies to join the 2nd North Carolina Infantry Battalion in 1862 and became a prisoner at Gettysburg. Upon being exchanged in 1864, he joined the 1st North Carolina Sharpshooters, with whom he remained through the war.[4]

The Breakthrough at Petersburg on April 2, 1865, forced the Army of Northern Virginia from its entrenchments and led to the surrender of Petersburg and Richmond the next day. During the battle, Pvt. Bahnson received orders to recapture a battery, an objective which he and his unit ultimately failed, incurring heavy casualties. These losses galvanized him, as “the killing and wounding of my comrades thoroughly aroused the brutal part of my nature. The desire for revenge made my aim deliberate, and I felt a fiendish delight as I saw a man sink down or tumble over after my shot.”[5]

By nightfall, “Our thirst, though, was insatiable. Again and again one would run or crawl to the ditch and fill several canteens from its foul bottom, full of dead men and spattered with blood and brains, but how refreshing to our parched mouths and throats that water was.”[6] Belatedly discovering the rest of the army was in retreat, he and the small party accompanying him passed through Petersburg, following the Richmond & Petersburg line north. They warned civilians pulling supplies from a train about the imminent danger of nearby fires, yet they took no heed. Not long afterward, “the cars of ammunition began to explode, and we could see women and children blown about in every direction over the ground.”[7]

Listed above are but a few of the gory highlights of this account. Bahnson has far more to say about the futility of war at the conclusion. The next episode, however, calls into question the article’s veracity. Bahnson finds relief by sneaking into a northbound ambulance, sleeping between two deceased men. Its driver awakened him the next morning, berating the private for “daring to ride in the General’s private ambulance. I don’t remember his name, but poor fellow, dead as he was, he had done me a great service…”[8]

The only Confederate general killed at Petersburg that day was ferried in the same direction: Lieut. Gen. A.P. Hill. His body, bound for Chesterfield County, was accompanied by his widow and child during the entire ambulance ride, according to an interview with said widow from 1896.[9] Bahnson’s claim to be alone in a general’s ambulance with two dead bodies is incongruent with this report, and his claim that he cannot recall the general’s name is nigh-inconceivable due to Hill’s prominence as a corps commander.

Bahnson makes another unlikely statement that he shot Brig. Gen. Thomas Smyth, the last general of the Army of the Potomac to be killed.[10] Unlike with Hill’s ambulance, the facts largely align. A member of the Second Corps, to which Bahnson belonged, killed Smyth in Farmville at roughly the same distance he indicated.[11] However, the North Carolinian claims that when his shot struck its mark, he saw blue fuzz fly from the general’s back, yet Smyth was struck in the mouth.[12]

Humor occasionally breaks through in the grim tale. Briefly taken prisoner during the battle of Appomattox Court House, he encounters Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan on his way toward Union lines, who asks him how many men remain under Lee’s command. “I told him 70,000 or 80,000, and he invited me to the bad place with a fluency and versatility of expression that indicated a thorough acquaintance with the resources of profanity. Everybody knows Sheridan was a great soldier. I have since been told that he was handsome. He may have been. I was a better judge of cursing in those days than I was of good looks.”[13]

After the surrender, Bahnson jumps ahead to his homecoming, where after a single relaxing evening he decides that he misses nothing about army life. “To my mind come only sad, and grim, and gloomy memories:—the forms of my comrades and friends hurried to an untimely death by disease and wounds, left a prey to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field—at best hastily and unceremoniously shoveled into a shallow trench; if haply surviving, maimed and crippled, and marred in health and usefulness; the privations and sufferings from fatigue and hunger, and heat and cold, and filth and nakedness, in comfortless camp, on toilsome march, in ruthless conflict, in loathsome hospital, in pitiless prison; fields deserted, homesteads and towns pillaged and burned, graves violated, sanctuaries defiled, Sabbaths desecrated; the havoc and ruin, the wanton waste and destruction, the merciless carnage; the unutterable agony of heart-rending grief that hung like the smile of torment over the tens of thousands of bereaved and desolated homes. The abomination of desolation!”[14]

Poetically, he encapsulates all the horrors of war condensed into a single paragraph, distilled as to be read together, but not diluted as to minimize a single one of its effects. It ends with a prayer that this may never again come to pass.

“May justice and righteousness dwell in this land; may mutual toleration and forbearance take the place of sectional jealousy and bitterness; may the God of love so completely fill the hearts and minds of this people, that the god of battle can nevermore find room in their thoughts; may the reign of the Prince of Peace speedily begin, and his dominion extend over all God’s beautiful earth!”[15]

So concludes Henry Bahnson’s The Last Days of the War. In a few pages, he conveys, in his mind, the wartime experience of a private, an experience absent of glory or higher calling. He often joked that he may be the only private to survive the war, as few seemed willing to publish their stories. Did these silences result from enlisted men assuming they have nothing impactful to say? Or, upon seeing favorable accounts written by officers, did they feel alienated from those seen as more successful? Would having a negative outlook on the war make them any less of a man to their contemporaries?

Bahnson seemed not to mind. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and several schools in Europe and was a remarkable surgeon with a kindred bedside manner. He bought the first Guernsey cattle in North Carolina and was instrumental in propagating their breeding stock. His positions included the presidencies of the North Carolina Board of Health, the Board of Surgeons of the Southern Railway System, and the North Carolina Medical Society.[16] His status may have shielded him from the derision his fellow privates felt they could face for sharing their own uncensored stories. The Last Days of the War offers a uniquely vivid narration that suffers from instances of likely falsehood, but its message is of great interest to the modern scholar of the common soldier. One can little doubt that Bahnson felt a shred of glory upon this work’s publication.

[1] Henry T. Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War.,” North Carolina Booklet 2, no. 12 (1903): 3.  https://digital.ncdcr.gov/Documents/Detail/north-carolina-booklet-great-events-in-north-carolina-history-1903-april/413507?item=450600.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018): 141, 213.

[4] Anna Withers Blair, “Bahnson, Henry Theodore,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. William S. Powell (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979). Republished on NCPedia, North Carolina Government & Heritage Library https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/bahnson-henry-theodore.

[5] Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War,” 6.

[6] Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War,” 8.

[7] Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War,” 10-11.

[8] Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War,” 11.

[9] Edward Alexander, “The State of A.P. Hill’s Physical Remains,” Emerging Civil War, July 10 2020, https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/07/10/the-state-of-a-p-hills-physical-remains/.

[10] Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War,” 15.

[11] Chris Calkins, The Appomattox Campaign, March 29-April 9, 1865 (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Books, 1997): 128.

[12] D.W. Maull, The Life and Military Services of the Late Brigadier General Thomas A. Smyth (Wilmington, De: H. and E. F. James, 1870): 43.

[13] Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War,” 19.

[14] Bahnson, “The Last Days of the War,” 22.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Blair, “Bahnson, Henry Theodore”.