“One of them was a better soldier than I was.”
Private Lawrence Daffan, Co. G, Fourth Texas Infantry, at Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862:
On the evening of the 16th we crossed the Antietam Creek, falling back from Boonsboro Gap. This occasioned some skirmishing and artillery duels across the creek, as we had taken a stand near Sharpsburg. We had orders the evening of the 16th to cook up three days’ rations, and to be ready to move at a moment’s warning. We were located nearly a half mile south of an old Dunkard church. There was heavy timber between us and the church; north and west of us there was a large stubblefield where wheat was cut. North of this stubble was a large cornfield of considerable dimensions. Corn there in September is as high as it is here in July; fodder was about ready to be gathered. By daylight the pickets commenced firing. By sunrise wer were ordered forward in line of battle. We stopped near the church in the heavy timber, the branches were falling on us, and many spent balls played around us. A short time after this we were ordered “forward.” We emerged from the timber into the stubblefield; some of it I think had recently been plowed. As we emerged from the timber, a panorama, fearful and wonderful, broke upon us. It was a line of battle in front of us. Immediately in front of us was Lawton’s Georgia Brigade. After we left the timber we were under fire, but not in a position to return the fire. As we neared Lawton’s Brigade, the order came for the Texas Brigade to charge. Whenever a halt was made by a command under fire, every man lay flat on the ground, and this was done very quick. Lawton’s Brigade had been on this line fighting some time before we reached them. Lawton’s Brigade attempted to charge, and did charge; their charge was a failure, because their numbers had been decimated; they had no strength. Then the Texas Brigade as ordered to charge; the enemy was on the opposite side of this stubblefield in the cornfield. As we passed where Lawton’s Brigade had stood, there was a complete line of dead Georgians as far as I could see. Just before reaching the cornfield General Hood rode up to Colonel [Benjamin F.] Carter, commanding the fourth Texas Regiment (my regiment), and told him to front his regiment to the left and protect the flank. This he did and made a charge directly to the west. We were stopped by a pike fenced on both sides. It would have been certain death to have climbed the fence. Hays’ Louisiana Brigade had been in on our left, and had been driven out. Some of their men were with us at this fence. One of them was a better soldier than I was. I was lying on the ground shooting through the fence about the second rail; he stood up and shot right over the fence. He was shot through his left hand, and through the heart as he fell on me, dead. I pushed him off and saw that “Seventh Louisiana” was on his cap. The Fifth [Texas], First [Texas] and Eighteenth Georgia, which was the balance of my brigade, went straight down into the cornfield, and when they struck this cornfield, the corn blades rose like a whirlwind, and the air was full.
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Lawrence Daffan was seventeen years old at the time. He survived this fight, the assault on Little Round Top at Gettysburg the following year, and the Battle of Chickamauga, only to be captured in late 1863 and spend the remainder of the war as a prisoner at Rock Island, Illinois. Passage from My Father as I Remember Him, by Katie Daffan. Image: “The Hagerstown Pike,” by Walton Taber.
Christmas Picket
[This post originally appeared on December 25, 2011.]
One hundred fifty years ago today, a nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier named Valerius Cincinnatus Giles (right, 1842-1915) went out on picket duty along the Potomac.
On Christmas morning a detail of twenty men was sent from the Fourth Texas Regiment to relieve the picket guard along the river. This detail was commanded by Lieutenant R. J. Lambert.
The post assigned me was on Cock Pit Point, about 100 yards from the masked battery. This battery of four guns was planted twenty feet back from the edge of the bluff. completely hidden from view by an abatis of pine brush felled and stacked, with the sharpened ends of the trunks pointing outward. as a crude defense. From my post I had a splendid view of the river for two or three miles in each direction. The low range of hills on the Maryland side opposite were covered with white tents and log cabins, the winter quarter of General Daniel E. Sickles’s New York Brigade.
The war had just fairly begun, and this was new to me. The novelty of the situation, the magnificent view before me, the river rolling majestically along between white hills and evergreen pines so charmed and captivated me at first that I felt not the bitter cold. The snow was gently and silently falling. deepening 011 the hills and valleys, melting as it struck the cold bosom of the dark river. I had been on post but a short time when I beard the signal corps man sing out from the crow’s-nest high up in a sawed-off pine tree, saying to the officer in charge: “Look out, Lieutenant, a gun boat is coming down the river!”
I could hear the artillery officer giving orders to his men, but from my position I could not see them. Looking up the river I saw a cloud of black smoke rising above the tops of the trees. All was excitement at the battery. and I could hear the artillerymen ramming home their shells, preparing to sink the approaching boat. Directly the steamer turned a bend in the river with volumes of black smoke pouring from her smokestacks. She was in the middle of the stream, coming dead ahead under full steam. It was really a disappointment to the fellows at the battery as well as myself, when the soldier in the crow’s-nest called out again: “0h, pshaw, Lieutenant, don’t shoot! She’s nothing but an old hospital boat, covered over with ‘yaller’ flags.”
Of course a Confederate battery would not fire on a yellow flag any more than on a white one.
The boat came steadily on down the river until she got nearly opposite Cock Pit Point, when she blew her whistle and turned toward the Maryland shore. As she made the turn she came within 200 yards of the Virginia bank and I could distinctly read her name on the wheel house. It was the old Harriet Lane. named in honor of the accomplished niece of President James Buchanan, who was queen of the White House during the administration of that eccentric old bachelor. In the winter of 1861 the Harriet Lane was in the employ of the Hospital Corps of the Army of the Potomac. A few days after that, she left her mooring on the Maryland side and pulled out down the river. She subsequently became a warship of some kind and met defeat at the Battle of Galveston in January, 1863.
After the boat bad landed and the excitement was over, a melancholy stillness settled around me. The novelty and fascination of my surroundings soon lost their charm. The lowering clouds above me and the white silence about me became monotonous and I began to feel restless and uneasy. If you are in a forest or on a prairie on a still summer day and will stop and listen attentively, you can bear the songs of birds, the chirping of crickets or the drowsy hum of insects. hut in a piney woods in midwinter, when the earth and green branches of the trees are covered with snow, with not a breath of air blowing, the stillness is oppressive. I must have bad a slight attack of homesickness, for I began to think of home and my mother and father away out in Texas waiting and praying for the safe return of their three boys, all in the army and all in different parts of the Confederacy — one in the Tenth Texas Infantry at an Arkansas post, one in Tennessee or Kentucky with Terry’s Rangers, and one in the Fourth Texas Infantry in Virginia. . . .
While I stood at my post on the banks of the Potomac I knew I was perfectly safe from any personal danger, yet something seemed to warn me of approaching evil. I tramped through the snow, half-knee-deep, although I was not required to walk my beat. I tried to divert my mind from the gloomy thoughts that possessed me, but all in vain. Suddenly I was startled from my sad reflections of home and kindred by distinctly hearing a voice I new — my brother Lew’s voice — calling my name. I turned quickly, looked in every direction, heard nothing more and saw nothing but the white world around me and the dark river below me. He was two years my senior, had been my constant companion and playmate up to the beginning of the war.
It was then 4 P.M., December 25, 1861. I was not sleeping or dreaming. and firmly believed at the time that I heard my brother calling me, but it must have been a delusion of the imagination.
However, Lewis L. Giles of Terry’s Texas Rangers, Troop D, Eighth Texas Cavalry, was mortally wounded at the battle of Mumfordsville, [Woodsonville] Kentucky, December 17, 1861, in the same charge in which Colonel Terry was killed. He was removed by his comrades to Gallatin, Tennessee. and died at the residence of Captain John G. Turner, a lifelong mend of my father. He breathed his last precisely at four o’clock on Christmas Day. 1861, while I stood picket on the banks of the Potomac.[1]
[1] Mary Lasswell, ed., Rags and Hope: The Memoirs of Val c. Giles, Four Years with Hood’s Texas Brigade, Fourth Texas Infantry, 1861-1865 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1961), 59-62. The compiled service record of Private Lewis L. Giles, Co. D, 8th Texas Cavalry, gives his date of death as Christmas Eve, December 24.
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Image: Private Val Giles in the spring of 1861, at the time of his enlistment in the Tom Green Rifles, a company later rolled into the Fourth Texas Infantry. From Voices of the Civil War: Soldier Life.
Christmas Picket
One hundred fifty-two years ago today, a nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier named Valerius Cincinnatus Giles (right, 1842-1915) went out on picket duty along the Potomac.
Christmas Picket
One hundred fifty-one years ago today, a nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier named Valerius Cincinnatus Giles (right, 1842-1915) went out on picket duty along the Potomac.
On Christmas morning a detail of twenty men was sent from the Fourth Texas Regiment to relieve the picket guard along the river. This detail was commanded by Lieutenant R. J. Lambert. The post assigned me was on Cock Pit Point, about 100 yards from the masked battery. This battery of four guns was planted twenty feet back from the edge of the bluff, completely hidden from view by an abatis of pine brush felled and stacked, with the sharpened ends of the trunks pointing outward. as a crude defense. From my post I had a splendid view of the river for two or three miles in each direction. The low range of hills on the Maryland side opposite were covered with white tents and log cabins, the winter quarter of General Daniel E. Sickles’s New York Brigade. The war had just fairly begun, and this was new to me. The novelty of the situation, the magnificent view before me, the river rolling majestically along between white hills and evergreen pines so charmed and captivated me at first that I felt not the bitter cold. The snow was gently and silently falling. deepening 011 the hills and valleys, melting as it struck the cold bosom of the dark river. I had been on post but a short time when I beard the signal corps man sing out from the crow’s-nest high up in a sawed-off pine tree, saying to the officer in charge: “Look out, Lieutenant, a gun boat is coming down the river!” I could hear the artillery officer giving orders to his men, but from my position I could not see them. Looking up the river I saw a cloud of black smoke rising above the tops of the trees. All was excitement at the battery. and I could hear the artillerymen ramming home their shells, preparing to sink the approaching boat. Directly the steamer turned a bend in the river with volumes of black smoke pouring from her smokestacks. She was in the middle of the stream, coming dead ahead under full steam. It was really a disappointment to the fellows at the battery as well as myself, when the soldier in the crow’s-nest called out again: “0h, pshaw, Lieutenant, don’t shoot! She’s nothing but an old hospital boat, covered over with ‘yaller’ flags.” Of course a Confederate battery would not fire on a yellow flag any more than on a white one. The boat came steadily on down the river until she got nearly opposite Cock Pit Point, when she blew her whistle and turned toward the Maryland shore. As she made the turn she came within 200 yards of the Virginia bank and I could distinctly read her name on the wheel house. It was the old Harriet Lane. named in honor of the accomplished niece of President James Buchanan, who was queen of the White House during the administration of that eccentric old bachelor. In the winter of 1861 the Harriet Lane was in the employ of the Hospital Corps of the Army of the Potomac. A few days after that, she left her mooring on the Maryland side and pulled out down the river. She subsequently became a warship of some kind and met defeat at the Battle of Galveston in January, 1863. After the boat bad landed and the excitement was over, a melancholy stillness settled around me. The novelty and fascination of my surroundings soon lost their charm. The lowering clouds above me and the white silence about me became monotonous and I began to feel restless and uneasy. If you are in a forest or on a prairie on a still summer day and will stop and listen attentively, you can bear the songs of birds, the chirping of crickets or the drowsy hum of insects. hut in a piney woods in midwinter, when the earth and green branches of the trees are covered with snow, with not a breath of air blowing, the stillness is oppressive. I must have bad a slight attack of homesickness, for I began to think of home and my mother and father away out in Texas waiting and praying for the safe return of their three boys, all in the army and all in different parts of the Confederacy — one in the Tenth Texas Infantry at an Arkansas post, one in Tennessee or Kentucky with Terry’s Rangers, and one in the Fourth Texas Infantry in Virginia. . . . While I stood at my post on the banks of the Potomac I knew I was perfectly safe from any personal danger, yet something seemed to warn me of approaching evil. I tramped through the snow, half-knee-deep, although I was not required to walk my beat. I tried to divert my mind from the gloomy thoughts that possessed me, but all in vain. Suddenly I was startled from my sad reflections of home and kindred by distinctly hearing a voice I new — my brother Lew’s voice — calling my name. I turned quickly, looked in every direction, heard nothing more and saw nothing but the white world around me and the dark river below me. He was two years my senior, had been my constant companion and playmate up to the beginning of the war. It was then 4 P.M., December 25, 1861. I was not sleeping or dreaming. and firmly believed at the time that I heard my brother calling me, but it must have been a delusion of the imagination. However, Lewis L. Giles of Terry’s Texas Rangers, Troop D, Eighth Texas Cavalry, was mortally wounded at the battle of Mumfordsville, [Woodsonville] Kentucky, December 17, 1861, in the same charge in which Colonel Terry was killed. He was removed by his comrades to Gallatin, Tennessee. and died at the residence of Captain John G. Turner, a lifelong mend of my father. He breathed his last precisely at four o’clock on Christmas Day. 1861, while I stood picket on the banks of the Potomac.[1]
“One of them was a better soldier than I was.”
Private Lawrence Daffan, Co. G, Fourth Texas Infantry, at Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862:
On the evening of the 16th we crossed the Antietam Creek, falling back from Boonsboro Gap. This occasioned some skirmishing and artillery duels across the creek, as we had taken a stand near Sharpsburg. We had orders the evening of the 16th to cook up three days’ rations, and to be ready to move at a moment’s warning. We were located nearly a half mile south of an old Dunkard church. There was heavy timber between us and the church; north and west of us there was a large stubblefield where wheat was cut. North of this stubble was a large cornfield of considerable dimensions. Corn there in September is as high as it is here in July; fodder was about ready to be gathered. By daylight the pickets commenced firing. By sunrise wer were ordered forward in line of battle. We stopped near the church in the heavy timber, the branches were falling on us, and many spent balls played around us. A short time after this we were ordered “forward.” We emerged from the timber into the stubblefield; some of it I think had recently been plowed. As we emerged from the timber, a panorama, fearful and wonderful, broke upon us. It was a line of battle in front of us. Immediately in front of us was Lawton’s Georgia Brigade. After we left the timber we were under fire, but not in a position to return the fire. As we neared Lawton’s Brigade, the order came for the Texas Brigade to charge. Whenever a halt was made by a command under fire, every man lay flat on the ground, and this was done very quick. Lawton’s Brigade had been on this line fighting some time before we reached them. Lawton’s Brigade attempted to charge, and did charge; their charge was a failure, because their numbers had been decimated; they had no strength. Then the Texas Brigade as ordered to charge; the enemy was on the opposite side of this stubblefield in the cornfield. As we passed where Lawton’s Brigade had stood, there was a complete line of dead Georgians as far as I could see. Just before reaching the cornfield General Hood rode up to Colonel [Benjamin F.] Carter, commanding the fourth Texas Regiment (my regiment), and told him to front his regiment to the left and protect the flank. This he did and made a charge directly to the west. We were stopped by a pike fenced on both sides. It would have been certain death to have climbed the fence. Hays’ Louisiana Brigade had been in on our left, and had been driven out. Some of their men were with us at this fence. One of them was a better soldier than I was. I was lying on the ground shooting through the fence about the second rail; he stood up and shot right over the fence. He was shot through his left hand, and through the heart as he fell on me, dead. I pushed him off and saw that “Seventh Louisiana” was on his cap. The Fifth [Texas], First [Texas] and Eighteenth Georgia, which was the balance of my brigade, went straight down into the cornfield, and when they struck this cornfield, the corn blades rose like a whirlwind, and the air was full.
_____________
Lawrence Daffan was seventeen years old at the time. He survived this fight, the assault on Little Round Top at Gettysburg the following year, and the Battle of Chickamauga, only to be captured in late 1863 and spend the remainder of the war as a prisoner at Rock Island, Illinois. Passage from My Father as I Remember Him, by Katie Daffan. Image: “The Hagerstown Pike,” by Walton Taber.
Christmas Picket
One hundred fifty years ago today, a nineteen-year-old Confederate soldier named Valerius Cincinnatus Giles (right, 1842-1915) went out on picket duty along the Potomac.
On Christmas morning a detail of twenty men was sent from the Fourth Texas Regiment to relieve the picket guard along the river. This detail was commanded by Lieutenant R. J. Lambert.
The post assigned me was on Cock Pit Point, about 100 yards from the masked battery. This battery of four guns was planted twenty feet back from the edge of the bluff. completely hidden from view by an abatis of pine brush felled and stacked, with the sharpened ends of the trunks pointing outward. as a crude defense. From my post I had a splendid view of the river for two or three miles in each direction. The low range of hills on the Maryland side opposite were covered with white tents and log cabins, the winter quarter of General Daniel E. Sickles’s New York Brigade.
The war had just fairly begun, and this was new to me. The novelty of the situation, the magnificent view before me, the river rolling majestically along between white hills and evergreen pines so charmed and captivated me at first that I felt not the bitter cold. The snow was gently and silently falling. deepening 011 the hills and valleys, melting as it struck the cold bosom of the dark river. I had been on post but a short time when I beard the signal corps man sing out from the crow’s-nest high up in a sawed-off pine tree, saying to the officer in charge: “Look out, Lieutenant, a gun boat is coming down the river!”
I could hear the artillery officer giving orders to his men, but from my position I could not see them. Looking up the river I saw a cloud of black smoke rising above the tops of the trees. All was excitement at the battery. and I could hear the artillerymen ramming home their shells, preparing to sink the approaching boat. Directly the steamer turned a bend in the river with volumes of black smoke pouring from her smokestacks. She was in the middle of the stream, coming dead ahead under full steam. It was really a disappointment to the fellows at the battery as well as myself, when the soldier in the crow’s-nest called out again: “0h, pshaw, Lieutenant, don’t shoot! She’s nothing but an old hospital boat, covered over with ‘yaller’ flags.”
Of course a Confederate battery would not fire on a yellow flag any more than on a white one.
The boat came steadily on down the river until she got nearly opposite Cock Pit Point, when she blew her whistle and turned toward the Maryland shore. As she made the turn she came within 200 yards of the Virginia bank and I could distinctly read her name on the wheel house. It was the old Harriet Lane. named in honor of the accomplished niece of President James Buchanan, who was queen of the White House during the administration of that eccentric old bachelor. In the winter of 1861 the Harriet Lane was in the employ of the Hospital Corps of the Army of the Potomac. A few days after that, she left her mooring on the Maryland side and pulled out down the river. She subsequently became a warship of some kind and met defeat at the Battle of Galveston in January, 1863.
After the boat bad landed and the excitement was over, a melancholy stillness settled around me. The novelty and fascination of my surroundings soon lost their charm. The lowering clouds above me and the white silence about me became monotonous and I began to feel restless and uneasy. If you are in a forest or on a prairie on a still summer day and will stop and listen attentively, you can bear the songs of birds, the chirping of crickets or the drowsy hum of insects. hut in a piney woods in midwinter, when the earth and green branches of the trees are covered with snow, with not a breath of air blowing, the stillness is oppressive. I must have bad a slight attack of homesickness, for I began to think of home and my mother and father away out in Texas waiting and praying for the safe return of their three boys, all in the army and all in different parts of the Confederacy — one in the Tenth Texas Infantry at an Arkansas post, one in Tennessee or Kentucky with Terry’s Rangers, and one in the Fourth Texas Infantry in Virginia. . . .
While I stood at my post on the banks of the Potomac I knew I was perfectly safe from any personal danger, yet something seemed to warn me of approaching evil. I tramped through the snow, half-knee-deep, although I was not required to walk my beat. I tried to divert my mind from the gloomy thoughts that possessed me, but all in vain. Suddenly I was startled from my sad reflections of home and kindred by distinctly hearing a voice I new — my brother Lew’s voice — calling my name. I turned quickly, looked in every direction, heard nothing more and saw nothing but the white world around me and the dark river below me. He was two years my senior, had been my constant companion and playmate up to the beginning of the war.
It was then 4 P.M., December 25, 1861. I was not sleeping or dreaming. and firmly believed at the time that I heard my brother calling me, but it must have been a delusion of the imagination.
However, Lewis L. Giles of Terry’s Texas Rangers, Troop D, Eighth Texas Cavalry, was mortally wounded at the battle of Mumfordsville, [Woodsonville] Kentucky, December 17, 1861, in the same charge in which Colonel Terry was killed. He was removed by his comrades to Gallatin, Tennessee. and died at the residence of Captain John G. Turner, a lifelong mend of my father. He breathed his last precisely at four o’clock on Christmas Day. 1861, while I stood picket on the banks of the Potomac.[1]
[1] Mary Lasswell, ed., Rags and Hope: The Memoirs of Val c. Giles, Four Years with Hood’s Texas Brigade, Fourth Texas Infantry, 1861-1865 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1961), 59-62. The compiled service record of Private Lewis L. Giles, Co. D, 8th Texas Cavalry, gives his date of death as Christmas Eve, December 24.
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Image: Private Val Giles in the spring of 1861, at the time of his enlistment in the Tom Green Rifles, a company later rolled into the Fourth Texas Infantry. From Voices of the Civil War: Soldier Life.
The Veteran, the Historian, and the Things Not Seen
Over the Christmas holiday in 1905 Lawrence Daffan (1845-1907), a former private in the Fourth Texas Infantry, dictated to his daughter Katie a biographical sketch of his life, along with more detailed accounts of two major actions he served in. After his death, Katie published these in a memorial book, My Father as I Remember Him.
In the memoir, Daffan recalled that after the Army of Northern Virginia was turned back at Gettysburg and withdrew across the Potomac,
we then marched to Culpepper, where we camped a while, then on to Fredericksburg, thence to Port Royal, where we camped some weeks.
While at Culpepper we had something of a riot in our regiment, caused by one of the regiment being ordered to wear a ball and chain, which we thought was a disgrace to our regiment and to the State of Texas. A number of us boys, who did not know any better, attempted to take him from the guard. Charges of mutiny were made against twenty-five of us, and we were put under arrest. Our captains were responsible for our appearance at court. This relieved us from drill and every other duty for six weeks of the summer.
Our trial was ordered to take place at General Longstreet’s headquarters, at Fredericksburg, in the first days of September, 1863. We were then camped at Port Royal, twenty miles east of Fredericksburg. We were all ordered to report to General Longstreet’s headquarters, near Fredericksburg, to be tried. On the way there I stopped at my uncle’s home, Champ Jones, twelve or fifteen miles from Fredericksburg, and did not arrive at Fredericksburg until after my “crowd” had arrived there. In going, I was alone. There was no guard with any of us. In looking for the headquarters where I might be tried, I went to the camp of the battalion of artillery, and the major commanding met me. I asked him to tell me where the General’s headquarters were, and he said “At the Reynold’s place, a large, white house about a mile away.” He said, “What are you going for?” I said, “I am going to be court-martialed for mutiny.” He said, with astonishment, “What, looking for a court to be court-martialed? That beats everything I ever heard of.” I said, “yes,” and he replied to go ahead, that he didn’t think I would be shot. I was then eighteen years old. We were all cleared through the influence of General Lee.
This anecdote was first widely published forty years ago in Harold B. Simpson’s Hood’s Texas Brigade: Lee’s Grenadier Guard, and has been mentioned in other secondary accounts since. To my knowledge, it’s not corroborated by other firsthand accounts. (Giles’ Rags and Hope mostly skips over this period of relative inactivity.) Ten years ago, Texas A&M historian Charles E. Brooks included this anecdote in his journal article, “The Social and Cultural Dynamics of Soldiering in Hood’s Texas Brigade,” published in the Journal of Southern History. Brooks briefly summarizes Daffan’s account, and then assesses it in terms of its time and place — not 1863, but 1905:
Written years later after the cult of the Lost Cause had romanticized the war and magnified the heroic deeds of Confederate soldiers, Daffan’s account only noted parenthetically that neither he nor the others “knew any better” at the time. But his amplifying comment was characteristic of many wartime reminiscences, which often glossed over the continuous conflicts that had taken place between officers and men concerning matters of discipline and subordination. Young Private Daffan and the others knew exactly what they were doing when they tried to rescue their fellow soldier. Although enlisting as a soldier of the Confederate Army required soldiers to occupy a new social status somewhere between freedom and slavery, the ball-and-chain punishment had blurred the distinction beyond what they were willing to accept.
Shorter: Daffan’s account is a reminiscence that has to be understood in the context of the time it was recorded.
Comparing these two passages makes for a good illustration of what a professional historian does. Daffan’s account, like so many written about that same time, stresses the humor and devil-may-care attitude of soldiering during the war. Daffan was indeed eighteen at the of this incident, but he was also a veteran (by his own count) of at least six different engagements, including Second Manassas, Sharpsburg and Little Round Top. The soldiers understood what they were doing when they tried to overpower the prisoner’s guard. Daffan and his compatriots also understood at least the potential penalty upon conviction of mutiny by a court martial; it cannot have seemed to Daffan at the time to have been such a summertime lark as he suggests when he describes his arrest as relieving “us from drill and every other duty for six weeks of the summer.”
Brooks’ reference to the pervasiveness of the Lost Cause is not supposition; it’s true both generally, and in Lawrence Daffan’s case specifically. Daffan was an active member of UCV and the Hood’s Texas Brigade Association; his daughter Katie was secretary and sole female member of the latter organization. When the local UDC chapter bestowed the honorary title of “colonel” on Lawrence Daffan, he adopted it immediately, and used it in both his personal and professional life so much that, upon his death, newspapers around the state referred to him as “Col. Daffan,” even though he’d never risen above the rank of private during the war.
Daffan was captured late in 1863 an spent the remainder of the war in the prison camp at Rock Island. Although he spent almost as much time as prisoner as he did as a soldier in the field, in his memoir he generally declines to discuss the hardships of this period in his life, commenting instead on the sheer boredom of the experience, where one day was exactly like the one before, and exactly like the one following, so that there was little concept of the passage of time. In fact, Daffan apparently left much unsaid in his dictation, and found his recollections, as they appeared on the page, difficult emotionally. As a preface to his autobiographical sketch, Katie wrote that
he would frequently related some anecdote or little incident, which he did not deem worthy of being included in the sketch, but which was invariably interesting.
Once or twice, while reviewing the battles [i.e., Second Manassas and Sharpsburg], he gave way to weeping and expressions of the deepest feeling, very unusual for him.
He told me that it carried him back to the days when he was a boy, that it was all so vivid, and so much had occurred since to change him, and so many of his friends and comrades had died, that it made him very sad.
What were the “invariably interesting” anecdotes that Daffan thought too inconsequential to commit to paper? More important, what ugly and terrible experiences remained, insufficiently blurred by the passage of time and memory, that he declined to recall for Katie’s note-taking? My guess is that the latter includes Gettysburg, notably missing from Daffan’s story, where the Fourth Texas remained pinned on the slopes of Little Round Top after the failed assault on the Federal left on July 2, or the habit of the “hundred dazers” walking post on the wall at Rock Island occasionally to relieve their own boredom by squeezing off rounds into the prisoners’ barracks.
None of this diminishes the value of the memoirs of old veterans like Daffan, but it does remind us that, even as important as they are as the record of the men who were there, they nonetheless have real limitations. Their tales of battle, hardship, humor and adventure are only as complete as they themselves recalled them.
Or were willing to.
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Image: Fife and drums at the United Confederate Veterans’ reunion, Washington, D.C., 1917. Library of Congress.
“One of them was a better soldier than I was.”
Private Lawrence Daffan, Co. G, Fourth Texas Infantry, at Sharpsburg (Antietam), September 17, 1862:
Then the Texas Brigade was ordered to charge; the enemy was on the opposite side of this stubblefield in the cornfield. As we passed where Lawton’s Brigade had stood, there was a complete line of dead Georgians as far as I could see. Just before we reached the cornfield General Hood rode up to Colonel [Benjamin F.] Carter, commanding the Fourth Texas Regiment (my regiment), and told him to front his regiment to the left and protect the flank. This he did and he made a charge directly to the west. We were stopped by a pike fenced on both sides. It would have been certain death to have climbed the fence.
Hays’ Louisiana Brigade had been in on our left, and had been driven out. Some of their men were with us at this fence. One of them was a better soldier than I was. I was lying on the ground shooting through the fence about the second rail; he stood up and shot right over the fence. He was shot through his left hand, and through the heart as he fell on me, dead. I pushed him off and saw that “Seventh Louisiana” was on his cap.
The Fifth [Texas], First [Texas] and Eighteenth Georgia, which was the balance of my brigade, went straight down into the cornfield, and when they struck this cornfield, the corn blades rose like a whirlwind, and the air was full.
Lawrence Daffan was seventeen years old at the time. He survived this fight, and the assault on Little Round Top at Gettysburg the following year, only to be captured in late 1863 and spend the remainder of the war as a prisoner at Rock Island, Illinois.
Quotation from Voices of the Civil War: Antietam (Time-Life, Inc., 1996). Image: “The Hagerstown Pike,” by Walton Taber.
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