Small Talk-Trivia

Miscellany

By Stephen Davis · Originally published January 2019 · pp. 32–44

What battle in Tennessee became notorious as a “massacre” of African American Union troops? 2. This Union cavalry officer led a raid toward Richmond in the winter of 1864, allegedly to capture and kill President Davis. In the failed effort he lost his life. Who? 3. What battle is featured in Michael Shaara’s novel, The Killer Angels (1974)? 4. Who famously exclaimed, “Damn the torpedoes!”? 5. On Sept. 15, 1862, Confederate troops led by Stonewall Jackson captured the Union garrison at an important U.S. arsenal town. Which one? 6. At what entertainment venue was President Lincoln when he was fatally shot?
What Union general led the Louisiana Red River Campaign in the spring of 1864? 8. Who, and in what battle, is noted for having remarked about war, “It is well this is so terrible! We should grow too fond of it”? 9. A physician invented a six-barreled machine gun named after him. Who? 10. Credited with holding Little Round Top for the Federals on the second day of Gettysburg is this colonel of the 20th Maine. Answers found on page 44. Steve Davis is the Civil War News Book Review Editor. He can be contacted by email at: [email protected].

Answers 1.

Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864. In an essay published sixty years ago in Civil War History, Albert Castel termed the event “essentially an outburst of racial antagonism” between Forrest’s men and the predominantly black garrison. About the same time Dudley Taylor Cornish, in The Sable Army: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865, declared, “it has been asserted again and again that Forrest did not order a massacre. He did not need to.” 2. Col. Ulric Dahlgren, son of the Union admiral, was twenty-one years old at the time of his death on March 2, 1864. After an amputation at Gettysburg, he walked with a wooden leg. Confederates examining his body found that it was hollow and retrieved several documents. Among them was a sheet of stationery printed “Headquarters Third Division,” on which an unnamed officer wrote, “the men must be kept together and well in hand, and once in the city it must be destroyed and Jeff Davis and Cabinet killed” (James O. Hall, “The Dahlgren Papers,” Civil War Times Illustrated, November 1983, 30-39). 3. Gettysburg. My favorite passage from the novel has Longstreet talking with Fremantle about a conversation he had heard among Confederates about Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which had been published two years before the war. As the general recounts to the Englishman, one Southerner declaimed, “Well, maybe you are come from an ape, and maybe I am come from an ape, but General Lee, he didn’t come from no ape.” In Turner’s film adaptation of the novel, the conversation takes place among Pickett’s three brigade commanders, Armistead, Garnett and Kemper on the night of July 2. 4. Union Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (1801–1870). According to Chester G. Hearn, Admiral David Glasgow Farragut: The Civil War Years (1998), Farragut yelled, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead, Drayton! Hard a starboard! Ring four bells!” 5. Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The surrender of 12,500 officers and men occurred on September 15, 1862. The capitulation was the largest surrender of United States armed forces until the surrender of Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines, May 1942 (Department of the Army, American Military History 1607–1953 [1956]). The surviving arsenal equipment had been moved to Richmond, Va., and Fayetteville, N.C., by the Confederates during 1861. 6. Ford’s Theater. Originally a Baptist church, Baltimore theatre entrepreneur John T. Ford leased the building in December 1861. After renovation, Ford’s Atheneum opened in mid-August 1862. A fire four months later led to expansion and remodeling. The new theatre reopened on August 27, 1863 (W. Emerson Reck, A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours [1987]). 7. Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks. Banks’ campaign to capture Shreveport in the spring of 1864 ended in failure, though Banks did not describe it as such. “There is a futile attempt to make a victory out of this,” wrote Rear Admiral David Porter, “but two or three such victories would cost us our existence” (Fred Harvey Harrington, Fighting Politician: Major General N. P. Banks [1948]). 8. Gen. Robert E. Lee at Fredericksburg, Dec. 13, 1862, as quoted in George C. Rable, Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (2002). 9. North Carolina-born Richard J. Gatling (1818–1903). 10. Joshua L. Chamberlain (1828–1914).