************************* BEERS TO YOU ************************
Ethelinda Eliot of Goshen, New York, was a descendant of John Eliot, known as "the apostle to the Indians." As an adolescent she began contributing poetry to newspapers and magazines.
Since she regarded her surname as "tame and commonplace," she customarily signed her work as Ethel Lynn. At age nineteen, after becoming the bride of William H. Beers, her pen name became Ethel Lynn Beers.
One of her many Civil War poems first appeared as "The Picket Guard" in the November 30, 1861 issue of Harper's Magazine. Remembered for its vivid first line, "All quiet along the Potomac tonight," the poem is seldom recognized as the product of a woman who chose for herself an elegant-sounding name. Instead, "All Quiet Along the Potomac" is usually thought to be the work of a veteran in blue who spent many nights on picket duty.
******************* MEAT AND POTATOES MAN *********************
Although no one knows exactly how much gold left Richmond hurriedly in April 1865, Lieutenant Warren H. Mead of the Sixth Kentucky Cavalry never forgot the exact amount he received ninety days earlier.
Captured and shipped from one stockade to another, Mead wound up at "Camp Sorghum," adjacent to Columbia, South Carolina. After guards instructed him, he drew a draft upon his father. The terms of the instrument made Lockwood Mead of Genoa, Cayuga County, New York, liable for $50 in gold. In return for the draft, the prisoner of war was handed a blue slip of paper worth $399.99 in Confederate currency.
Mead turned the bulk of his money into extra provisions. With "a piece of poor fresh beef the size of a man's hand ranging in price from $14.00 to $17.50," during the fifteen days before the prisoners were liberated by Sherman's forces, Mead spent more than two hundred Confederate dollars on meat and sweet potatoes.
****************** THE THREE MUSKETEERS ***********************
In a little-known caper, a quartet of French adventurers left Washington late in March 1862. Their destination was Richmond, where they planned to kidnap Jefferson Davis. Traveling under assumed names selected from Alexander Dumas's "The Three Musketeers," they reached Manassas without difficulty.
At the spot made famous in July 1861, "Porthos" managed to shoot himself in the hand with his pistol. That forced him to give up the adventure, but his companions pressed on toward their target.
Deciding that they could not make it without horses, the three remaining Frenchmen bargained with a Virginia farmer. The man had three good horses he was willing to sell, but he declined to take the trio's greenbacks. He did, however, provide them with mounts when they produced $300.00 in gold. As the farmer pocketed the gold, he pointed out the road to Fredericksburg as a gesture of goodwill. Neither the horses nor the goodwill did the trio much good; they were discovered by a Confederate patrol and were returned to Washington.
********************** BEE'S LEGACY **************************
Debate concerning the origin of the familiar nickname bestowed upon Confederate Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson is not likely to subside. No one knows for certain what Brigadier General Barnard Bee meant when he said that Jackson stood "like a stone wall" at Manassas. Earlier, as an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute, the man who became immortalized as Stonewall had been called Old Blue Light and Tom Fool.
Bee's comment may have been a compliment, but some suggest it was an insult. Whatever the case, after July 21, 1861, "Old Blue Light" was forgotten as "Stonewall" scored victory after victory. From that day on the Manassas battlefield to the end of the war, his brigade was known officially as the Stonewall Brigade. That made it the only brigade in gray to be designated by an officer's nickname.
****************** LEADING SOULS TO VICTORY *******************
Hundreds of clergymen left their flocks to go to the battlefield with the units mustered from their villages and towns. Most of them served faithfully in obscurity.
Not so the Reverend T. L. Duke of the Nineteenth Mississippi Regiment. Near Fredericksburg, Virginia, men of Brigadier General Carnot Posey's brigade wavered during hand-to-hand fighting. Reverend Duke seized a musket, raced to the front of his regiment, and there "mainly directed the movements of the skirmishers."
As a result, the Mississippi clergyman became the only Confederate chaplain to be cited officially for gallantry in battle.
