Copyright by Hershel Parker
26 June 2022 Still needs
revising--Need to mark parts quoted from Charles Martin’s biographical account. Some of them are run in,
now.
Ch.
9--Adventures of Milton Walker Sims
Two of my cousins, Major Milton Walker Sims
(1831-1912) and Lieutenant Jesse Sparks (1837-1896, the subject of the previous
chapter), were, I think, not kin to each other and may never even have spoken
to each other. I suspect they lived out their lives not knowing they were
connected in any way except as listed in military documents while serving under
officers E. Kirby Smith or P. O. Hébert. Chances
are they never knew that the two
of them were accused of perpetrating a wartime atrocity together: “Maj. M. W. Simms, of General Hébert's staff, C. S.
Army” along with “with Lieutenant Sparks, also of General Hébert's staff,” were
“charged with ordering the murder of two Federal officers, taken prisoners by
them near Lake Providence, La., in the month of June last. It appears that
Major Simms and Lieutenant Sparks did cause two Federal officers to be taken
into the woods at night, and then shot and partially buried.”
That
is only part of what Lieutenant
Loren Kent, provost-marshal-general to U. S. Grant, wrote on 24 September 1863
to Brig. Gen. John A. Rawlins, Assistant Adjutant-General for the Department of
Tennessee. Those words and what I quote next are almost all grossly inexact
when not outright false, as I explain later. This is the separate accusation
that Loren Kent went on to make: “Major
Simms caused four ministers to be dragged from their beds and brutally
murdered; also . . . he hung a negro soldier near
Delhi, La., in the month of June.”
The accusation
about the ministers is ludicrous (how could Sims have located them, and why? were
they in one bed? were they black? white? mulatto? were they secret
Abolitionists conspiring in Monroe or wherever?). Yankees just then were making
preposterous charges to strengthen Northern opposition to the war. Soldiers
could report to Northern newspapers that rebels had killed half a dozen Federal
officers in an action, but the army kept records and knew when Federal officers
were accounted for or not. (Yankees did not keep record of the rebels who died
in their prisons. Look at the appalling lists of the nameless dead interred on
Johnson’s Island, where this same Sims was imprisoned.) Some accusers were
gullible in passing on rumor as fact, but we must allow for personal malice and
malevolence. For Loren Kent, we have contemporary record of political zealotry
and records of how contemptuous he was of Southerners who came before him in
his work under U. S. Grant. We also know how he knew to pull the names of
Sparks and Sims together.
For all this, there
is merit in Kent’s final charge, inexact but close to the truth. It “appears”
(as I show later) that Sims (not Simms) ordered the hanging of not one but two
captured black soldiers, formally, officially, in the presence of his troops at
Floyd, Louisiana, and sent two others to headquarters, as the new state of
Louisiana law required of any officer. There was nothing surreptitious about
the hangings.
For the first
time, early in 1863, the Union was arming free blacks from the north as well as
newly freed slaves from (the states that count here) Louisiana and Mississippi and
putting them in battle against Confederates. Some armed blacks were killed because
Confederates refused to treat captured blacks as prisoners of war: if you kill
them in battle no one challenges you, officers such as Brigadier General E.
Kirby Smith and General Richard Taylor agreed. General John G. Walker
considered it an unfortunate circumstance when any armed negroes were captured.
Grant understood this when he was satisfied by a letter Taylor wrote. Such
killings become just death in combat. Many charges of rebel atrocities toward armed
blacks (mainly former slaves) were false, although the worst atrocity, at Fort
Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, really happened: there, blacks were
slaughtered instead of being treated as prisoners of war, as U. S. Grant was
demanding that they be treated.
In the South
blacks with guns had always meant insurrection, slave revolt, pillaging, rape, death
to white men, women, and children. Freedom for blacks by government edict was shocking
even for Confederates who were not from slave-holding families: whites were
accustomed to a degree of polite deference if not subservience. Sims may have
found the idea more disconcerting than most others did, for according to the
1860 census, he had been a slaveholder on a massive scale in Texas. I don’t
understand how so young a man (born 10 January 1831) could have been so wealthy
unless it was by marriage to a Texas Ragsdale. His father, William Sims, had
been one of the children twice burned out of the Sims Settlement just south of
Tennessee in what became Alabama, their crops destroyed, their animals killed
or turned loose, themselves driven over the Tennessee line at gunpoint. The
large Sims family (certainly most of it) survived at least one winter in rough
sheds with roofs made of wide strips of bark from very old-growth trees--instant
village, Barksville, Tennessee.
Thanks in part
to Milton’s grandmother’s remarriage to William Cocke, the multi-state
legislator and orator who almost succeeded in creating the State of Franklin,
Milton’s father became comfortable in Columbus, Mississippi, on the Tumbigbee,
but not (not in 1830 and 1840--ck later) a slaveowner. He sent Milton to be
educated at Emory and Henry College, Virginia, in the western corner where
Tennessee and North Carolina are very close. From Grenada, Mississippi, in 1857,
Milton’s brother, Doctor John Randolph Sims, wrote to their uncle Absalom Sims (my
own grandfather, a ways back): “Brother Milton & wife were down here not long since. He has just
returned from Texas & is much pleased with the country. He made a visit to
sister’s in Coahoma County [Mississippi]
& seems to be very much pleased
with the swamp lands—is strongly in favor of moving to that county & thinks he will do so if he can make arrangements
to suit him.” Soon, Milton chose instead practice law in Austin, Texas, and be a
rancher nearby. Maybe the money was from his wife, Frances Ragsdale; after her
dead a female family member was in the Sims household, probably caring for the
children, and quite wealthy, having something like $20,000. Wealthy
Texans says Milton owned at
least 77 slaves. This was serious undercounting, the 1860 census shows, despite
a dozen or so slave deaths in 1859 and early 1860, mainly from cholera. In 1861,
already a widower, Milton entrusted his two small children to women kinfolks
and volunteered for the Confederacy.
For many Confederate
farmers turned soldiers, emancipation of slaves was hard to argue against;
ordinary Southerners, far more than Northerners, knew some black men in casual
intimacy and if cornered might admit that slavery was wrong. But arming black
soldiers seemed to Southerners Lincoln’s way of heaping new terror on top of
all the misery of having two years of war waged only on Southern soil. People
forget what being in a battlefield meant. In Virginia the Richmond Whig
on 8 June 1863, just before the tragic folly of Gettysburg, printed “The Belt of Desolation,” summarizing
the devastation already inflicted on the South: “Day by day the track of the
destroyer becomes broader. Two-thirds of Virginia, two-thirds of Tennessee, the
coasts of North and South Carolina, part of Georgia, nearly all of Florida,
northern Mississippi, western and southern Louisiana, a great part of Arkansas
and Missouri, have already been laid waste, and every hour brings tidings of
fresh destruction. Dispatches of Saturday informed us that the enemy had
destroyed a million dollars worth of property on the Combahee and stolen a
thousand negroes. It was but a few days ago that they ravaged the county of
Matthews in this State [Virginia], and even while we write tidings come to us
that they are burning private houses and destroying every grain of corn they
can lay their hands on in the counties of King and Queen. Enough has been said
of the barbarism of this mode of warfare, and too much has to be confessed of
the entire impunity with which it is carried on. . . .” The “Belt of
Desolation” was reprinted all over the North and West--from Wheeling (Virginia on
the masthead still) to San Francisco and even (in August) in Honolulu.
A Southerner who left Clinton,
Mississippi of 11 April 1863 and crossed the River at Natchez, headed for
Little Rock, said he and others were “foot cavalry,” suffering unnecessarily
from “the malevolence and hatred” of the Yankees: “The cutting of the levee on the
Upper Mississippi has flooded Louisiana for hundreds of miles. Plantations that
a year ago wore smiling promises of an abundant harvest are now flooded with
water, and only here and there are to be found evidence of animal life. Streams
flow into and from each other, cross and recross each other, meet upon common
ground and flow in opposite directions, with a rapidity and eccentricity that
were perfectly bewildering. Lakes and bayous and rivers become so intertangled
and enfibred as to be perfectly undistinguishable from one another.”
In December 1862, half a year before
his conquest of Vicksburg, General Grant with “entire impunity” had expanded
what the Whig called “the war of
desolation.” He raided deep into Mississippi, destroying railroad tracks,
shelling houses, seizing all livestock, sending thousands of whites and blacks
homeless to wander in mud as they tried to get children, some animals, perhaps a
few possessions, across rivers, creeks, lakes, and bayous. There was water
everywhere. On 2 June 1863 the Buchanan County Guardian (Independence, Iowa) said farm animals were swallowed up,
and horses and riders: “Frequently a horse and rider would go down together,
the horse drowning and the rider barely escaping with his life.” Alligators
thrived, and mosquitoes. Snakes were around your feet but they could also fall
on you from trees, as old friends told me when I returned to the Sabine area in
1957, just after Hurricane Audrey. None of the newly homeless had enough food
for long and had to resort to pillaging or begging or simply starving. As Grant
marched through the south people simply disappeared, as my Parker great great
grandparents did in Itawamba County, Mississippi, leaving a five or six year
old boy to feed himself and perhaps others by running deadfalls barefoot in the
snow of 1864.
On Grant’s 1862 raid any Yankee soldier
could enter a fine house and break a piano (not to be found in poorer houses) into
small fragments and run his sword through feather beds and laugh and hoot as
the room or the grounds filled with irrecoverable feathers, fine houses being
more challenging and rewarding for pillagers. “Barbarity in Mississippi” was an
account of the pillaging of Oxford which the Natchez Courier reprinted on 3 January 1863. This was a “narrative of the
depredations committed by the Hessians under Grant, in and about Oxford,
Mississippi.” The Hessians were, people still remembered, the German hirelings
the British set loose to rape women and their pre-pubescent daughters (in front
of each other) in New Jersey in the Revolution. Think Russians in Berlin in
1945 or in Ukraine in 2022. The Courier
correspondent saw pillaging everywhere: “Houses were entered and robbed
unblushingly every hour of the day and night and in almost every block in the
town of Oxford. Women were compelled to get out of bed in their night clothes
that their beds might be searched for money or other valuables. . . . Deserted
houses were entered and the contents stolen and destroyed from pure
maliciousness.” In the scheme of destruction this next was trivial, but in
Oxford, papers and books of the writer of Georgia
Scenes, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, president of different universities,
including that of Mississippi, were torn up, pages ripped from books to light a
fire and destroy his house. (Even worse for historical archives, Yankee
soldiers destroyed books and papers of General Richard Taylor, among them state
papers of his late father, President Zachary Taylor, thrown out into mud.)
In Crimes
of the Civil War (1869) Henry Clay Dean verified reported looting and added
details about the raid on Oxford: “the large stocks of provisions which the
families of that region were accustomed to keep in their smoke houses, were
rendered unfit for food by knocking in the heads of barrels containing sugar,
molasses, four, vinegar, etc., and mingling all together with salt and ordure
from the stable.”
While Grant was allowing the ravaging
of Oxford (part of the devastation of the future of the South) he drove one
particular band of people to wander about on foot. On 17 December he issued
General Order #11 (1862) about “The
Jews, as a class.” Grant ordered Jews expelled from any part of Mississippi,
Tennessee, and Kentucky under his military control--his “Department.” At Holly
Springs, Grant’s supply depot about twenty miles north of Oxford, his soldiers
rounded up Jews and drove them out of the city and left them there, on foot.
Only arrival of the Confederate Earl Van Dorn in Holly Springs three days later
prevented a more rigorous expulsion of Jews. Elsewhere, as in Paducah,
Kentucky, Jewish families were treated roughly and driven out of the city.
On 31 December
1862 the St. Louis Missouri Republican said: “Gen. Grant has issued an order for all
Jews in his Department to leave; consequently there is a general stampede. The
order has been enforced in Paducah, causing great consternation among Hebrew
merchants.” Grant’s less formal order for the supply station read this way: “On
account of the scarcity of provisions, all cotton speculators, Jews and other
vagrants, having no honest means of support, except trading upon the miseries
of their country, and in general, all persons from the North not connected with
the army who have no permission from the General commanding, to remain in Holly
Springs, will leave in twenty-four hours, or they will be sent to do duty in
the trenches.” These Jews and other vagrants were “not allowed south of the
Tallahatchie.” Lincoln countermanded the Order on 4 January 1863, but a small new
class of people had become refugees to move searching for food and dry clothing
in the winter. How many of them were abused on their treks away from
their homes? how many of them returned to intact homes and lived in them? Grant
was not accused of committing atrocities in this raid into Mississippi. As I
write this Russia is daily accused of atrocities in Ukraine. If you do it on a
grand enough scale it becomes warfare and collateral damage and not atrocity.
In April and
May 1863 Col. Benjamin Grierson and his cavalry made a 600 mile raid starting
in Tennessee and ending in Baton Rouge, then held by Union forces. His scouts cleverly
wore Confederate uniforms and deceived many Confederate soldiers. The
Lancaster, PA Express 9 May 1863
printed General U. S. Grant’s praise as Grierson neared Union controlled Baton
Rouge: “He had spread excitement throughout the State, destroying railroads,
trestle-works and bridges, burning locomotives and railroad stock, taking
prisoners and destroying stores of all kinds.” Grierson had continued what
Grant started, so no wonder he rejoiced at Grierson’s work.
A little
later, the Burlington VT Times on 23
May 1863 and many other papers printed
“The Exploits of Grierson’s Cavalry,” a celebration: “Grierson’s cavalry in
their great raid through Mississippi went more than eight hundred miles in
seventeen days, fighting wherever they me with opposition. They killed and
wounded a large number of the enemy, and destroyed over four millions of
dollars worth of property which would have been of immense assistance to the
rebels in the persecution of the war. On two important railroads thy completely
cut off all communication with the strongholds of the enemy. They took over a
thousand prisoners, captured over twelve hundred horses, and menaced the enemy
at points where they were least expected. An idea of their activity may be
formed from the fact that they travelled seventy-five miles, fought four
battles, skirmished considerably, forded a river, and all the time neither men
nor horses had anything to eat.” Well, men and horses going for days without
drinking or eating shows the ignorance of the writer in Vermont and shows also
worshipful glee.
Any well fed and otherwise well-equipped
invader feels contemptuous of the inhabitants he is pillaging. Just as casual looting
happened in Oxford under Grant’s foray south, it happened at many places in
Grierson’s longer, faster ride. Farms and plantations were destroyed everywhere, and everywhere
Northern troops thousands of
slaves were told they were liberated, most with no place to go. Like Grant, Grierson committed no
atrocities.
But whole towns disappeared. In late May 1863 Colonel Ellet of the Mississippi Marines (a
Union force, “Mississippi” meaning the River, not the state) thought munitions
might be stored in Austin, Mississippi, so he burnt the town, “having first
searched every building.” He sent men with torches to burn the school, where books
lay abandoned. In safety he reveled in the sounds of battle: “As the fire
progressed, the discharge of loaded fire arms was like volleys of musketry as
the fire reached their hiding places, and two heavy explosions of powder also
occurred.” One of Ellet’s tender-hearted officers claimed he never forgot “the
sad scene of women and children left alone with their burning houses slowly
eating away all hope.”
On 15 June 1863 the Federal Col. Mower “made
an expedition to Richmond, La., and drove the rebels from that section.” The Liberator on 26 June said Mower “burnt
the town, and brought the women and children to Milliken’s Bend.” Safe in
Boston, Frederick Douglass could not envision what words he was printing. How
could women and children be transported and in what conditions would they be
left? What were they eating and wearing? Under the headline “The Black
Flag” the Liberator said Col. Mower “states positively that the rebels
carried the black flag with skull and cross-bones in the recent attack on Milliken’s
Bend.” Stating “positively” meant nothing, there were so many lies being told.
The Liberator at this time would
print any incendiary report, some of which were actually true.
In early July 1863 Major Sims got a
sense of this confusion after he crossed the River from Louisiana and, riding a
mule, headed for Jackson with a message for the Confederate General Johnston. He
found the woods full of women and children who had left their homes to avoid
the shelling then going on, though an occasional one would drop over among
them, even where they were. Some were going further eastward, some had hope
that Johnson would yet whip the enemy and save their homes,, and some were just
coming out of the city. Through this mass of excited humanity men, women and
children, horses, vehicles and dogs, he made his way into Jackson, across a pontoon bridge.
In the very widely reprinted “Letter
from Young’s Point,” the Cincinnati Enquirer’s correspondent (M. W) declared
that the “whole country from Milliken’s Bend to Hard Pines, opposite Grand Gulf
a distance of sixty miles, is one ‘abomination of desolation.’” Not one of
these actions by Union troops and officers was decried as an atrocity, not even
when a whole town was burned and those who had lived there made homeless. Is it
possible that no babies or old folks died when they were driven out of their
homes into the mud and water? But these were not atrocities, not even rape of prepubescent
females.
As Grierson was conducting his raid, northern
papers were hastening to praise the way armed blacks were behaving in battle.
The editors’ own racist attitudes are clear Northern in descriptions of freed
slaves, armed and unarmed. M. W. cleverly characterized the armed blacks:
“Recruiting for the ‘Ebony Regiments’ goes on quite briskly, though I do not
believe that the number enlisting is at all equal to that anticipated by the
projectors of the scheme. Sambo don’t much relish the idea of becoming a
soldier. To exhibit their feelings I will relate an instance. On my journey
from ‘Perkins’ to this place [John Perkins had burned his grand mansion north
of Baton Rouge as the Yankees approached], being overcome with sickness and
fatigue, I was forced to stop at what had once been a lordly mansion; now
without doors or windows, it is the abode of a horde of negroes. I demanded
lodging, supper and breakfast, fed my horse with Uncle Sam’s corn, had a supper
of cornbread, bacon and coffee, belonging to the same venerable gentleman [i.e.,
Uncle Sam]; slept on one of his blankets, and had a duplicate of the supper for
breakfast. I said, ‘Sam,’ to the master
of the house, a likely young darkey, ‘how do you live?’ ‘Oh, fust rate’
said he, ‘the soldiers leave plenty behind them.’ ‘Do you work any?’ ‘Work, no
indeed, massa, I’s work all my life,’ he replied with a look of insulted
dignity at the idea of a free darkey working.” M. W. wanted to know what he
would do when all the food the soldiers left was gone: “‘Don’t know; guess get
along somehow.” “Why don’t you go join the army, live like a decent man, and
not go about picking the scraps that soldiers throw away?” “’Cause, massa, I’s
been a slave all my life, and I don’t want to be a slave no more.’ ‘You
infernal rascal,’ said I, waxing wroth, ‘do you tell me that a soldier is a
slave?’ Darkey began to turn white, and stammered: ‘Not ’zactly, massa, but I’s
been a slave, and don’t want to go to be a soldier.’ The future condition of
these benighted people is a theme for the consideration of every Christian
philanthropist. I see nothing but famine, disease and death in their future.” M.
W. was not the only Yankee with such views toward the blacks they were
liberating. Yankee editors found blacks, armed or not, were obvious people to
blame for their fathers, husbands, sons, and other male family members being
South, endangered often for the first time in their lives--to some, more
obvious even than Southern whites.
Once black troops were in combat at
Milliken’s Bend, some Northern newspapers did their best to celebrate their
bravery. The Pittsburgh Post on 13
June 1863 in “THE NEGRO HEROES” surveyed what the press was saying about the
attack on Port Hudson. The New York Tribune
directed attention “to the heroic achievement of ‘one negro with a rebel
soldier in his grasp, tearing the flesh
from his face with his teeth.” This, said
the Post, as “the cannibal kind of warfare which most attracts Abolition
admiration.” In the north, soldiers and editors were adjusting, slowly, to the
idea of armed blacks in the Union army.
The Janesville Wisconsin Gazette on 26 June 1863 printed a letter
a local man received from his brother, writing from Chickasaw Bayou on 18 June.
Blacks had been proud to serve: “In the fight at the Bend, the negroes lost
about 20 killed and 160 wounded. They used the bayonet, stock and barrel. One fellow shot one rebel,
bayoneted another, and finished the third
by knocking his brains out with the butt of his musket. Another took his old master prisoner, brought him in to his officers and
introduced him as ‘My old massa.’ He
was a happy nigger.”
The New Orleans True Delta on 31 July 1863 quoted the New York Herald of 19 July as an example of “the stupendous lying of the New
York journals”: “We learn that the Texas troops
who now occupy the Lafourche country have perpetrated the most horrible
outrages on the plantations worked by the [Federal] government. They have driven off the able bodied
negroes, and have slaughtered in cold blood over three hundred women, children
and old men. This is not mere rumor, it is well authenticated; and positive
information has been received that the
persons of some of the negro men found in arms have been mutilated in the most
terrible manner. What is the result of this? What is the government to do,
and what will our people of the North say when they hear of such horrible
atrocities having been committed?” (In New York City in the month of July 1863
mobs, mainly newly-arrived Irish who did not want to be soldiers, dragged a naked
black through the streets by his genitals and hung up other blacks so
Irishwomen could cut off their genitals.)
The Burlington VT Times on 22
August 1863 printed “Relapsing into Barbarism”: “The following, from the
Chicago Post, on the authority of
Lieut. Cole, of the Mississippi Marine brigade” (remember, that was a Union
brigade), is suggestive of the superiority of rebel civilization: ‘The day
after the battle of Milliken’s Bend, in June last, the Marine brigade landed
some ten miles below the Bend, and attacked and routed the guerrillas which had
been repulsed by our troops and the gunboats the day previous. Major Hibbard’s
cavalry battalion of the Marine brigade followed the retreating rebels to
Tensas bayou, and were horrified at the finding of skeletons of white officers
commanding negro regiments, who had been captured by the rebels at Milliken’s
Bend. In many cases these officers had been nailed to the trees--and crucified;
in this situation a fire was built around the tree, and they suffered slow
death from broiling. The charred and partially burned limbs were still fastened
to the stakes. Other instances were noticed of charred skeletons of officers
which had been nailed to the slabs, and the slabs placed against a house which
was set on fire by the inhuman demons, the poor sufferers having been roasted
alive; nothing was left but charred remains.’” Lieutenant Cole vouched for the
truth of his report which army records shows was false: the Union did not keep
track of rebels who died in their prison camps but they did keep track of
Federal officers, so they knew when any officer was missing after a battle.
In Saint Clairsville, Ohio the Belmont Chronicle on 20 August reprinted
Cole’s declaration from the Missouri
Democrat as “Rebel Barbarism” as showing “the character of the enemy”:
“Does not such acts demand retaliation? And yet, the editor of the Gazette
calls the order of President Lincoln threatening retaliation unless they are
stopped, an effort to make ‘white men out of niggers and niggers out of white
men.’ Oh shame, where is thy blush?” Perjury did not damage Cole’s health. The
month of fame in newspapers may have strengthened it. On 21 July 1922 the
Lexington KY Leader printed a
tribute: “CAPTAIN S. S. COLE, OLDEST U.
S. EMPLOYEE, TO RETIRE--Ninety-Six-Year-Old Superintendent Of Camp
Nelson National Cemetery Feels He Has Earned Rest--Mexican And Civil War
Veteran, Personal Friend Of President Lincoln.” Was he as honest as his friend Abe?
Arkansas Confederate troops in
Mississippi, Texas troops in Louisiana, were astounded early in 1863 by armed
black soldiers, most of them recently freed slaves. General Grant wanted them
to be treated as regular Federal soldiers and if captured to be treated as
prisoners of war. Louisiana and other states quickly decided that armed blacks
if caught alive were to be hanged. This invited outright murder. A Confederate
soldier in battle had the choice of trying to disarm and capture an armed black
or simply to shoot him as an enemy. On
22 June 1863 Grant, near Vicksburg, wrote to General Richard Taylor at Delhi,
Louisiana. From a white man, a Southerner, he said, he had learned “that a
white Captain and some negroes, captured at Millikens Bend, La . . . were
hanged soon after at Richmond. Furthermore, “a white Sergeant, captured by
Harrison’s Cavalry at Perkins’ plantation, was hung.” He was cautious, not
railing against Taylor, open to the possibility that such hangings were done by
people out of control, irresponsible. Nevertheless, he wanted such people
punished, and he was straightforward: “I can assure you that these colored
troops are regularly mustered into the service of the United States. The
Government and all Officers under the Government are bound to give the same
protection to these troops that they do to any other troops.”
Taylor repudiated such “acts disgraceful
alike to humanity and the reputation of soldiers.” Anything said to be amiss at
Richmond was simply false: “I remained at Richmond and in its vicinity for
several days after the skirmish to which you allude, and had any officer or
negro been hung the fact must have come to my knowledge, and the act would most
assuredly have met with the punishment it deserved. The handing of a white sergeant
by Colonel Harrison’s cavalry is, I am satisfied, likewise a fabrication. . . .
As regards negroes captured in arms, the officers of the Confederates States
Army are required by an order emanating from the General Government to turn all
such to the civil authorities, to be dealt over with according to the laws of
the State wherein they were captured.” Grant professed himself satisfied by
glossing over that last comment.
On 3 July at Monroe, Louisiana, far west into the state, Brigadier General Kirby Smith
ordered Milton Sims to leave the next day to carry an old message from General Joseph
Johnston to Major Pemberton at Vicksburg. The previous messenger had returned
to Monroe sick after almost two weeks of trying to get through the Federal
picket lines. The area, of course, was swarming with Grant’s troops. There was
almost no hope that the message could be acted upon, but Sims was sent forth it
and a cover letter to General Johnston “at the earliest practicable moment.”
Amazingly, on this fool’s errant Sims got to Natchez despite the extreme summer
heat and went on, all the way to Jackson, where he found Johnston in “undress,”
not formal uniform, who gave Sims just enough attention to say, “Too late.” It
was also too late for Sims but he made “a run for it” to escape capture. “Seeing
an artillery captain who lived in Natchez entering a close carriage on his
invitation,” Sims was soon flying from the city. . . . until “the carriage was
stopped by a squad of federal cavalry drawn up across the road and he was made
a prisoner. Being taken back to Natchez he and his friend were escorted to the
court-house, the headquarters of Gen. Ransom,” who was indecisive: “he decided
to send him to Vicksburg to report to Gen. Grant and in company with
thirteen other confederate officers, he was sent to that place, embarking that
afternoon on the steamboat Luminary.
Arriving at Vicksburg next day, July 15, the prisoners were taken to Gen.
Grant’s headquarters, but he being sick and downright cross, their case was
referred to Gen. McPherson, with whom they pleaded earnestly for parole, but
without avail, and were ordered on board the prison boat Emerald, on which were
already some 800 confederate prisoners. “Their baggage had been left on board
the Luminary, and each having but a small amount of clothing they were anxious
to get it, consequently Major Sims was delegated by the other officers to ask
to have it transferred to the Emerald.” Sims was bedraggled but the best choice
for spokesman--college educated, formerly a rich man, with likely the best
physique in any group of a dozen or so men--prepossessing.
Sims easily took on the task: “He spoke
to Col. Loren P. Kent, Gen. Grant’s provost marshal general, about it, but
received no answer and a second time with the same result. The third time he
spoke, urging that they were being sent north, and as each had but little clothing
they were anxious to get that. Looking at them a moment Col. Kent replied:
“You damned rebel son of a bitch, you
don’t deserve any baggage.”
They didn’t get their baggage, and
going on board the Emerald they found
her crowded to overflowing. “The deck, boiler deck and hurricane deck were
packed like sardines with confederates, a great many of them sick in all stages
of various diseases. The scuppers were reeking with filth and the stench was
almost unendurable.” The officers were assigned berths in the cabin, but this
made their condition worse, if anything, as there was so little air to be had,
and the consequence was many were made sick with something like cholera.
Sims did not know why he was a
prisoner. At some point his brother Ben Sims learned of a charge against him.
On 18 October 1863 Ben from Meridian, Mississippi wrote to General Johnston
hoping he could gain the release of his brother who had delivered messages from
Kirby Smith to Johnston but then had been jailed “on the charge of having
ordered the execution of two Federal prisoners at the engagement at Milliken’s
Bend.” Where Ben got his information, especially the words “Federal prisoners,”
is not known, but this was mainly accurate (not the location): “Federal
prisoners” included armed blacks. Milton was not told the charge against him
for many weeks, it seems. And by 18 October Ben knew only that specific charge.
“Thus ‘cabined, cribbed and confined’
they steamed up the river for the Alton, Ill., penitentiary [a trip of some
days]. Nothing of special note happened on the trip beyond the almost daily
landing of the boat to bury one or more dead confederates who had died, exposed
in their sickness to the blistering July sun during the day and to the damp,
cold air of the river at night, and to-day the bones of many a brave
confederate soldier are moldering in the alluvial soil of the great father of
waters, the hearts of their loved ones far away aching through all the weary
years that have gone by because they came not home again, ignorant of where or
how or when they died. But they were nothing but ‘damned rebel sons of bitches’
and ‘treason had to be made odious.’”
At Alton there was no room in the
penitentiary and small-pox was raging there. They prisoners were lucky, for the
“old State penitentiary” at Alton, Illinois, where Sims would have been put,
was, in 1863 absolutely unnecessarily horrific, as an article in the Memphis Appeal 20 April 1863 made clear. In
winter with no heat men froze. Early in January and February 1863 fifteen men
died a day, on average. Luckily the steamship with Sims turned back to St.
Louis. There, officers got much better treatment
than enlisted men. They were put on the third story, not directly under an
uninsulated roof but in an airy well ventilated room. While there he got word
to a friend who brought him a shirt and boots and brandy. The officers played
cards and sang songs and drank up the brandy and thought of how they might
escape.
After some time (his brother Ben Sims
later said two weeks) they were sent to Johnson’s Island, in Lake Erie off
Sandusky, Ohio. Sims went on railroad under parole not to escape south. Sims
was not just prepossessing, he was extraordinarily handsome, not the sort of
womanizer who pursues women but a man that women sought out. A lady friend in
Glasgow Mo gave him $50 in greenbacks. With that he had money for booze on
train.
At Bellefontaine, Ohio, “the train
bearing the prisoners was detained some little time and quite a number of
ladies came to the depot ‘to see the rebel officers’--there were about twenty
officers. Most of these ladies seemed full of sympathy but there was one red-headed
buxom lass . . . who seemed to be as fiery as her hair. Seeing Major Sims smile
at some disparaging remark made by one of her companions she exclaimed:
“‘Look at that old general laughing. If
I had my way he should swing to a lamp post before night.’
“‘I am neither old nor a general, being
but a little more than 30 and only a major and I am a widower. I have always
had a weakness for red-headed women and if I pass through the war safely I
shall return to Bellefontaine and marry you, for I feel sure you will still be
single,’ responded Major Sims.
“Thus was one red-headed woman quieted,
she having no more to say after that about the rebels or the rebellion.”
We have Sims’s on description of his
time at Johnston’s Island, which he reached by steamer from Sandusky:
Reminiscence of Johnson’s
Island Prison. Confederate Veteran
By Capt. M. W. Sims, Bryan, Tex.
I see in the March VETERAN the article
by Capt. A. O. P. Nicholson, of Columbia, Tenn., who occupied the same room
(No. 10, Block 2) in Johnson’s Island Prison that I did. I was there in August
and September, 1863. I recall Col. Nixon, Col. Robertson, Maj. Bate, “Bill”
Minor, and Capt. George Ralston. The last-named and I were captured together at
Natchez, Miss., soon after the fall of Vicksburg.
We were a rich mess--paid a Confederate captain to cook for us. “Bill” Minor
had friends in New York, Hall and Hildreth, former lessees of the St. Charles
Hotel in New Orleans, who sent him money and cases of liquors; Col. I. O.
Nixon’s old partner had been lessee of the St. Charles Theater in New Orleans
(Johnny Owens, the actor, was in New York, and kept him supplied with wines,
etc.); while the writer had fifty dollars in greenbacks, sent him by a lady
friend in Glasgow, Mo.--so that up to the time I left, the latter part of
September, 1863, we “lived high.”
I was sent for by Maj. Hoffman, the
commandant, and on going to his headquarters was notified to be ready to leave
next morning, as I was to be sent to Gen. Grant at Vicksburg for special
exchange. All exchange of prisoners had been discontinued; but Gen. E. Kirby
Smith had captured Gen. Grant’s brother-in-law, Dent, who promised that if
released he would have me released also; hence the order for me to report to
Gen. Grant for special exchange. . . .
I doubt very much if any of the mess,
or occupants of Room 10, Block 2, are living other than Capt. Nicholson, Maj.
Bate, and the writer.” So that was Sims’s own story of Johnson’s Island, much
of which was a hell hole.
On 27 July 1863 Lieut. Gen. E. Kirby
Smith from Shreveport wrote to Grant. He had kept his part of the agreement but
the Feds had not: “I am informed that Mr Simms, a Volunteer aid de camp of Brig
Genl P. O. Hebert, was captured by a part of your forces at Natchez Miss, and
is now held a prisoner of war. This gentleman is a citizen of the Confederate
States without commission or rank in the army, and ought therefore to be dealt
with by your Government as any other citizen of the Confederacy not in the
military service. I have released Mr Lewis Dent a citizen of the United States,
who was captured by a part of my troops near the Mississippi. He has been
permitted to return with your lines.” In
fact, my cousin Lieut. Jesse Sparks had accompanied Dent, Grant’s
brother-in-law, into Union lines at Goodrich’s Landing. There Col. Isaac F.
Shepard wrote to Grant: “A flag of truce, borne by Lt. Col. F. C. Zacharie, Lt.
J. W. Sparks, and Lt. Conrad, has arrived here, being improperly passed through
the pickets. Judge Dent accompanies them. They bear two despatches from Gen.
Hebar to yourself. They are instructed to deliver them to yourself in person if possible. On 6 August,
Kent wrote “To all whom it may concern” an order that “Major Simms,” taken
prisoner near Natchez, “be released, and permission granted him to return to
his home.” Kirby Smith’s claim was accepted: “it has been discovered that Major
Simms has not been in the Confederate Army” and should be given “all the
privileges of non-combatant citizens.” Two days later Kent wrote to Bowers that
the man in question was “sent to Memphis with other prisoners of war on July 17th
1863. At that place they were turned over to other Officers, so that I cannot
designate their present whereabouts.”
By 11 August Grant, thinking he had
straightened things out, wrote to Col. William Hoffman about Sims, a prisoner of war “sent North the latter part of
July.” He wanted “Maj. Simmes” to be “released and returned to his home in
exchange for Judge L. Dent who has been released by Gen. Hebert and allowed to
return to his plantation.” The only connection between my two accused cousins
(other than service under is Hébert) is Jesse’s shepherding Dent back to
General Grant. All this passed through Loren Kent’s hands.
Orders reached the Erie Canal and
on 5 September on Johnson’s Island Sims
was told to report to Grant at Vicksburg to be exchanged. Cousin Milton counted
without the snarling little pencil-pusher who had cursed him as a damned rebel
son of a bitch for requesting their baggage for more than a dozen of his
fellows.
Martin tells the story: “Having arrived
at Memphis by steamer from St. Louis and laying over there for the night,
Lieut. Hollenbach (the friendly officer in charge of Sims) said he would go to
the theater and see something of southern life, never having been so far south
before and after the theater he concluded to ‘bogue,” as he termed it, around
awhile, the major being on parole, and take in the sights. This he did,
reaching the boat in the morning just in time to catch it. In due time they arrived
at Vicksburg and leaving their baggage at the famous old Washington hotel, they
repaired to Gen. Grant’s headquarters, where the lieutenant presented his
orders, was recognized and Major Sims was introduced to Gen, Rawlins, Gen.
Grant’s chief of staff, who greeted him most pleasantly and then he was
introduced to Col. Kent, the provost marshal general, whom he had met before,
but this gentleman not deigning to recognize the introduction or even look at
him, reached up to a pigeon hole and taking out a yellow envelope handed it to
a man at a desk in front of Major Sims and directed him to ‘examine those
papers.’ On the end of the envelope Major Sims caught the words indorsed,
‘relative to the hanging of Major M. W. Sims.’ Cold chills would chase one
another up and down any man’s back, he being a prisoner, on seeing such a
legend as that and Major Sims’ back not being different from the general run
his spinal column underwent that delightful sensation, though he had nerve
enough not to manifest any discomfiture or to give evidence that he had any but
the most pleasant feelings and hopes. Still standing, albeit invited to be
seated, he covertly watched the man as he examined the papers. He also observed
low-toned conversations between Lieut. Hollenbach and other gentlemen present.
The lieutenant finally went out, returning in a short while and then he read in
the countenance of that kind-hearted little man that his fate was sealed. The
officer examining the papers having concluded turned to Col. Kent and a whispered
conversation took place between them when he turned to his desk and began
writing.” Here Milton’s unusual height made it possible to learn what was being
ordered. “Glancing over his shoulder as he wrote, not a discourtesy under the
circumstances, the major read an order for his incarceration in a dungeon,
there to be kept in solitary confinement, allowed to communicate with no one,
until further orders. These were hope-paralyzing words to a man moneyless and
friendless, a prisoner in the hands of an enemy, but brave hearts never lose
hope nor strength, no matter how perilous the environments may be, nor how dark
the day. There is always a light behind the clouds and the courageous man never
dies till he is dead, to use a paradox, and Major Sims was just that sort of
man. No eye could have told that he had a thought save of a speedy exchange.
“As the officer of the guard removed
the major Lieut. Hollenback came up to him, shook his hand in kindliest grasp
and as the tears welled up into his eyes said:
“‘Good bye! Poor fellow, may God bless
you!’
Major Sims bade him
good bye with buoyancy in his face, though his heart was heavy within his
bosom, expressing the hope that when the war was over they would meet again and
renew their acquaintance under happier auspices than those of their first
meeting.”
On the voyage down to Vicksburg Sims was
allowed to talk to a Mrs. Cook, who in Memphis had seen her son die in Irving
Block, a prison almost unspeakably vile, as an 1864 report to Lincoln stated:
“the prison which is used for the detention of citizens, prisoners of war on
their way to the North and the United Sates soldiers awaiting trial and which
is located in a large block of stores is represented as the filthiest place the
inspector ever saw occupied by human beings. The whole management and
government of the prison could not be worse! Discipline and order are
unknown. Food sufficient but badly served. In a dark wet cellar I
found twenty-eight prisoners chained to a wet floor, where they had been
constantly confined, many of them for several months, one since November 16,
1863, and are not for a moment released even to relieve the calls of nature.
With a single exception these men have had no trial." Grant at his worst
installed and reinstalled the corrupt warden. Mrs. Cook, seeing Sims “in his
old, tattered, threadbare uniform,” called him to her “and on the trip down the
river they soon became well acquainted.” Bravely, Sims told her “his bright
prospects for a speedy exchange.”
This is from Sims’s piece on Johnston’s
Island in the Confederate Veteran:
“On my arrival in Vicksburg, I found that I had been charged with shooting some
prisoners at Milliken Bend, La., and had been sentenced to death--quite a
change from my expected liberty. I was placed in a cell in the Vicksburg jail,
where I was when the battle of Chickamauga was fought [19-20 September]. This
is significant, because Sims was already in jail days before Loren Kent
elaborated charges against him.
“As they proceeded on their way to town
the officer of the guard remarked to the major that he was going to prison, to
which he responded no, that he had been sent down for special exchange. . . .
Finally they arrived at the jail and giving his baggage check to the officer
with the request that he get his little luggage from the hotel and send it to
him” [a request never fulfilled] “the major entered the prison and was soon
inside an iron-bound iron-ceiled cell, the door closed, the key turned, the
bolt shot into its socket, and he was alone with the dread eight of the little
had caught of his doom, heavy on his heart, with no friend to whom he could appeal
save that friend above who never fails those who come to him with their woes,
no matter how great they are.”
“In his cell that first night he ransacked
his brain as to the probable charges against him and the only conclusion he
could reach was furnished by an occurrence of a short time before he had been
sent with a dispatch to Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. One day while in command on
the advance line, in April, it was on Bayou Macon, La., four negroes were
captured. These negroes were runaway slaves from a plantation near by who had
enlisted in the federal army and were caught with arms in their hands making
war upon the white people. He telegraphed the capture to headquarters, asking
for instructions as to what to do in the primises.[CK] In answer he was ordered to
send two of them to Delhi and have them hanged in the presence of the troops
there and the other two to hang in the presence of the troops at Floyd, where
he was stationed. This order he executed.
He simply obeyed orders. A man is not, can not be a soldier who will not
obey the orders of his superior in command. For this, he reasoned, he had been
condemned to suffer death in the same way. His conscience did not hurt him. How
could it? Under the laws of the sovereign state of Louisiana the offence of
these negroes was visited with death by hanging, the order of his commanding
officer was to hang them, as a soldier he obeyed orders and he executed the law
of Louisiana.”
When Sims did not manage to look Mrs. Cook
up in Vicksburg, she made fruitless inquiries and at last went to see Grant,
who had fallen from his horse in New Orleans and was still too weak to see her.
This dates part of Sims’s imprisonment, for on 4 September a “fiery horse” ran
away with Grant and “fell from a rebound against a carriage in the road.” Mrs.
Cook then went to see General McPherson, who told her the major could not be
exchanged, but was in prison and was to be executed “for tying up some
officers.” She smuggled a note to him. One part baffled him, Sims said: “the
‘tying up of some union offices” was “news indeed, nothing of the sort ever
having occurred.” Did McPherson think “tying” was a witty way of saying
“hanging”?
A college-mate of Major Sims living at
Monroe got his father-in-law, a strong union man, to go to Vicksburg and
intercede for the major while he was there in jail, but Gen. Grant informed him
that a number of men captured at Milliken’s bend had been foully dealt with and
as Major Sims was the only officer he had from that military district, he would
be executed in retaliation whether he was guilty or not, so it seems that he was
to be a victim to lex talionis, without regard to whether or not he had really
committed any offense himself. Erratic often enough, even two or three weeks
after the horse fell on him, Grant was in a vindictive mood.
Martin was not exact about the dating,
except for the battle of Chickamauga: “It was late in the afternoon in the last
days of September when the doors shut the major into solitary confinment. The
only light and air he had came through a grate in the iron door, and his
quarters were not onl confined, cold, damp and gloomy in the extreme, but
filthy beyond comparison. What his feelings were as in darkness and silence,
save the monotonous tramp of the sentry before his door, he contemplated his
situation and thought of his motherless little ones far away in their Texas
home, let us pass by and draw the veil upon. Shortly to die and by the
hangman’s rope, and for what? He did not know the charges against him even,
never having been faced by any accuser, never having had so much as the
semblance of a trial--simply transported from one prison to another to be
hanged, and to this day he has little more than a surmise as to why he had been
selected for execution.”
Still recovering from being crushed by the
horse, Grant, fearful of an attack, ordered all prisoners then in Vicksburg to
be sent to General Hurlburt in Memphis. This is from Sims in the Confederate
Veteran: “All the prisoners in Vicksburg, including myself, were ordered to
be sent to the ‘Irving Block’ in Memphis.” Even if he had not been hanged, he
would not likely have survived Irving Block. What graduate of Emory & Henry
would delight in being chained on a wet floor in “a dark wet cellar” with two
dozen other prisoners, months at a time, “not for a moment released even to
relieve the calls of nature.”
Milton Sims was lucky, however much he
suffered. The “old State penitentiary” at Alton, Illinois, where he thought he
was being sent, was, in 1863 absolutely unnecessarily horrific, as an article
in the Memphis Appeal 20 April 1863
made clear. Southerners who knew what Alton was like rather than be put there
plunged from the boat carrying them north “in the dead of winter” and took
their chances with “volleys of musket balls” in the hope of reaching shore.
Once there prisoners saw just how “inhuman and barbarous” it was. In winter
with no heat men froze. Early in January and February 1863 fifteen men died a
day, on average.
Andersonville prison was so horrible
that it has taken attention from Yankee prisons where Confederate prisoners
were put. The difference is that the South after a little while could not care
humanely for prisoners because they did not have enough free workers to make
prisons inhabitable and nowhere near enough food and medicine even for
themselves. Something about the psychology of the invaders and captors led to
almost unbelievable sadism on the part of Northerners. See To Die in Chicago, were at least one of my cousins, a Steward,
froze to death in an unheated cells I know what it is like to come from the
Gulf of Mexico to Chicago and expect to thrive there, even with heat and
clothing. I have seen Pea Patch Island off Delaware where there are openings (never
glassed) in cells where prisoners were kept in the milder mid-Atlantic winters.
Prisoners were treated as freaks. At Elmira, New York, towers were built so
refined ladies who paid a dime or fifteen cents could come all year round, and
in winter watch the prisoners freeze to death. Death rates in Elmira were close
to those in Andersonville. Yes, Sims was lucky in his way, however much he
could have appreciated clothing, blankets, good food and clean water.
Martin recorded
Sims’s response to the summons to Memphis: “Major Sims little expected to be
sent, but sure enough ‘glad tidings of great joy,’ his name was on the list and
then he said to himself, ‘It will be a wary guard who prevents me from at least
attempting to escape during the trip up the river.’” He remembered the cabin
crew and the hierarchy, “a mulatto steward and colored boys, all free negroes
who entertained the highest respect for a southern gentleman and a hearty
contempt for a slave, as well as for the emancipated negroes.”
He charmed the captain and some Federal
soldiers during the several-day short trip toward Memphis, playing cards and
drinking amiably. He also went into the ladies’ cabin and chatted with Mrs.
Montgomery: “She was a beautiful woman, 26 or 28 years old, and strong in her
southern sentiments.” Readily charmed also, she helped him plan his escape. Sims
gave the mulatto steward his gold watch and chain, which he had preserved with
some difficulty this far, and he hung up an old cork life-preserver by the
wheel-house each night. As he said to the Confederate
Veteran, “About an hour
before day I jumped overboard aft of the wheel room and swam ashore.” That was the last night before Memphis, and the shore
he swam to was the Mississippi side--at first, to an island.
Then began an adventure that lasted
several weeks. Penniless, poorly dressed, some of his clothing sacrificed after
the swim to shore, he made his way through the Federals, fleeing whites and
negroes, mile after mile of water in the great River, other rivers, lakes,
ponds, and bayou after bayou. As late as 4 November Hébert was writing to Dent, hoping that he knew
something about Sims. This is from one of the Milliken’s Bend sites: “After
jumping into the river and swimming to shore, Sims hid in the swamplands,
‘wandering for weeks, with no food but roots and berries.’ Wending his way
westward through northern Louisiana, Sims at last arrived at Hébert’s camp. ‘He
was a man considerably over six feet tall and finely proportioned,’ Hébert recalled, ‘but on his
return, he was so gaunt haggard and emaciated that no one recognised him.’
Despite his hardships, there was also good-natured laughter at his expense.
Sims entered the camp wearing a suit made out of ‘Calico window curtains . . .
of a very gaudy and striking pattern’ provided to him by a kindly woman he met
somewhere along the way.” This is a Milliken’s Bend site quoting something I
have requested from Tulane, Paul
Octave Hébert Scrapbook (Coll. #818)MAYBE ADD MARTIN ON THE WOMAN)
Meanwhile, on 24 September Grant’s
spiteful little Provost Marshal General Loren Kent wrote to the
Adjutant-General, Brigadier General John A. Rawlins:
“GENERAL: I respectfully call the attention of the
major-general commanding to the case of
one Maj. M. W. Simms, of General Hebert's staff, C. S. Army, who, with
Lieutenant Sparks, also of General Hebert's staff, is charged with ordering the
murder of two Federal officers, taken prisoners by them near Lake Providence,
La., in the month of June last, from sworn statements made before Capt. W. H.
Welman, Fifty-ninth Indiana Volunteers, by citizens of Monroe and vicinity. It
appears that Major Simms and Lieutenant Sparks did cause two Federal officers
to be taken into the woods at night, and then shot and partially buried.
Statements are also made that it is well known by the citizens of Monroe and
vicinity that Major Simms caused four ministers to be dragged from their beds
and brutally murdered; also that he hung a negro soldier near Delhi, La., in
the month of June. Major Simms is now in confinement at this place.
I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
L. KENT, Lieutenant-Colonel,
Provost-Marshal- General.”
If Sims was actually in confinement at
Vicksburg, this was written just before Grant decided to send prisoners to
Memphis to the Irving Block. Vagueness pervades the letter.
No statements made before Captain Welman are mentioned
elsewhere in 1863 and nothing from him about these allegations is known,
neither those specified as “sworn statements” nor those “also made.” Is it
possible that Loren Kent fabricated one or both? The curious thing is that Kent
knew about Sparks from one context, the confused treatment of Sparks and
Grant’s brother-in-law when they were under flag of truce. Was he angered by
something Sparks did or said, or something that Lewis Dent, Grant’s
brother-in-law, had done or said? It is absolutely certain that he treated Sims
with contempt the two times he was in his presence (not even looking him in the
face?). When Sims was spokesman for others Kent made him ask three times if
they could have their baggage. Kent saw him then, and I may be wrong but I
think he became fiercely jealous. Sims was magnificent--imagine Paul Newman
better looking, much more muscular, and a foot taller. An honorable man does
not slur a man under his control by calling him a damned rebel son of a bitch
without even looking him in the face. You have to remember the viciousness of
Kent, back in Illinois in July fantasizing sending all Copperheads where they
would be most apt to be slaughtered and leaving loyal men at home.
Even if we
take this putative account of Welman as accurate, we should be careful. In
September my cousins were not exactly charged with ordering the murder two
Federal officers in June--only that it “appears” that they caused others to do the vile deed, and it “appears” that they caused
others to be guilty of only partially burying the bodies. The evidence was said
to be “sworn statements” by “citizens of Monroe and vicinity,” very far away
from Milliken’s Bend, the most likely place Sims and Sparks might have
encountered Federal POWs in June. Yet Yankees were in control of Monroe only
hours, that summer, and had more to do that interview a series of gossipers,
some of them Jayhawkers, perhaps, from the brief invasion, not a lot of them
sympathetic to the North. The most curious part of this is how Loren Kent says Welman’s
Monroe accusers linked the two men. Were the Major and the Lieutenant
associated together in Monroe? Additionally, Milton was charged--well, not
charged-- with brutally murdering four ministers. He was charged with something
else: with causing four ministers to
be dragged from their beds, presumably at night, and brutally murdered. The
accusers were “citizens of Monroe and vicinity,” Welman supposedly said. Kent
does not say where these beds were, in a town? Beds imply a house or chapel or
some indoor shelter. The ministers, we assume, were not sleeping together, so
four beds in a row, or four beds in different locations?. Where, what streets
and houses, would Sims have known to direct compliant underlings to find four sleeping
minister, in successive or simultaneous raids? Were there four black or four white ministers (or one black three white, two black two white,
three black and one white) who were to be located at night and murdered? Kent
also charges that Milton (by himself) hung a negro soldier near Delhi,
Louisiana in June--presumably soon after the battle of Milliken’s Bend,
Louisiana, on 6 June (a long way from
Monroe--how would the citizens have known?). The location and date may be
wrong, but this final accusation is half right: following state law, Sims had
hanged two armed negro soldiers and sent two others to headquarters.
Kent is
remarkably vague and elusive, and modern scholars do not always pay attention
to precisely what Kent is imprecisely saying. Hollandsworth says that citizens
of Monroe “told Capt. W. H.
Welman of the 59th Indiana Infantry that two white officers captured by
Confederate troops near Lake Providence, La., had been taken into the woods one
night and shot. They identified the gunmen as Maj. M. W. Sims and Lieut.
Sparks, both members of Gen. Paul 0. Hébert's staff.” No, Kent had said that it
appeared that the two had caused something to be done--to be taken
into the woods and shot. Kent does not call them “the gunmen.” Barnickel says
Sparks was named “as a suspect” by Kent, who says in fact that Sparks was “charged
with ordering the murder of two Federal officers.” And of course what Sims, not
Sparks, did was hang two Federal soldiers, not officers, according to Louisiana
law. Barnickel says that “the
question of whether Sims and Sparks murdered two men and, if so, who they were
remains.” Well, you can drop Sparks from
this charge, and change “murdered” to “executed.”
This is Charles L. Martin: After
remaining on duty for some time in Louisiana Major Sims was sent to Texas with
the rank of colonel with order to increase Col. S. M. Baird’s battalion to a
regiment, to go to Arizona and New Mexico with a view of recapturing those
territories, Col. Baird to command the expedition. This Col. Sims did, being
authorized to organize into companies all men in Texas at home on furlough
belonging to commands east of the Mississippi river. there were a great many of
these men, some on furlough and some whose commands being reduced to skeleton
regiments by losses in battle and disease were disorganized, and he had little
trouble in soon forming a splendid regiment known as the sixtieth Texas
cavalry. There were men in this regiment who had heard the thunder of cannon
and the musical hum of minie balls along the Potomac, in Tennessee, Georgia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and from the mouth of
the Rio Grande to Dona Anna and Glorietta in New Mexico. The most of them were
veterans used to the hardships and perils of war and who had rather fight than
eat. But it was too late when the expedition was organized to go to New Mexico.
It was late in 1864 when the movement began and by the time the command was
ready to move in 1865 the confederacy was on its last legs. Grant was
thundering at the doors of Richmond, Gen. Joe Johnston was falling back into
North Carolina, Louisiana was being abandoned to the enemy so the second
expedition into New Mexico never culminated.
The “Sentenced to be Hanged” is a small
masterpiece by Charles L. Martin, a Texas newsman and historical researcher who
ought to have published the way Silas Turnbo in his own time and Studs Terkel
in the next century managed to publish (though some of his work was lost). Martin’s
knowledge was of that order, but he left very little in print. “Sentenced to be
Hanged” is first used here, not used even in Milliken’s Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory.” Martin
had served as Sims’s adjutant, as he said: “in my daily contact with him, as
his executive officer, by the campfire, in the closest social and official
relations, I came to know him well, to appreciate and to love him, and this
episode in his military career which I am about to give I know to be true in all
particulars.” Martin called the essay “part of the unwritten history of the war
that has long enough remained untold.” The pity--or outright tragedy for Texas
history--is that Martin did not write more of what he knew.
Martin did not mention Sim’s going to
Mexico at the close of the war and returning to pick up a pardon from Andrew
Johnson on 23 April 1866. Actors in the nineteenth century were typically more
noted for their voices than their looks, so I cannot call Sims as gorgeous as
any matinée idol. But you get a sense of
his powerful presence by the little story of the Empress Carlota dropping a
glove made of white kid with a dainty lacing of embroidered gold eyelets and
blue silk cords across the top, typical of its queenly owner and of the royal
life and splendor of Carlotta and Maximilian during their reign in Mexico.”
Sims, of course, gallantly picked up the glove and kissed it before returning
it to her. Charmed, she presented it to him with a sweet note which her family
finally published at her death in 1927. He
was a man of great capacity and many adventures.
Need: passage from Paul Octave
Hébert Scrapbook (Coll. #818)
