Sunday, June 26, 2022

Chapter 9 of An Okie's Racial Reckonings: ADVENTURES OF MILTON WALKER SIMS

 

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)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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