Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
She waited, clutching her arms about herself to ward off the cold, but there was nothing.
Heartsick, she descended into the house, found her mother, Judy, and Louisa in the parlor, and reported what she had seen. “When John returns, he may be able to tell us what happened,” she said dully, sinking into a chair. “I’ll contact the military clerks on my payroll in a few hours, to give them time to read the dispatches from the field.” Suddenly it occurred to her that some of her clerks might have witnessed the battle firsthand as members of the Departmental Battalion, the reserve company composed of deskbound clerks, who ordinarily saw no battle fiercer than jealous squabbling among their superior officers.
Before nightfall, Lizzie’s suspicions were confirmed: General Kilpatrick’s incursion had indeed been the cause of the artillery fire they had heard earlier that day, but after his cavalry raiders had advanced as far as the inner line of Richmond’s defenses, he had withdrawn to the outskirts of the city. She did not yet know why. None of Lizzie’s informants in the War Department mentioned Colonel Dahlgren or a second raid from the south. She could only imagine what had become of the dashing young officer.
It was not until the next day that Lizzie learned the disheartening truth. A former slave had been assigned to guide Colonel Dahlgren and his riders to a little-used crossing over the James, but when they arrived, they had discovered that heavy rains had rendered the ford impassible. Furious and convinced that the guide had betrayed him, Colonel Dahlgren had ordered him hanged by the roadside, providing his own reins for the grisly deed.
On March 2, with his original plan foiled and unaware of General Kilpatrick’s retreat, rather than abandon his mission, Colonel Dahlgren had decided to ride east above the James and charge into Richmond. His men had broken through the Confederates’ outer defenses at Westham Plank Road near Benjamin Green’s farm, but had been turned back by strong resistance from the Departmental Battalion. With the surprise attack thwarted, Colonel Dahlgren had withdrawn, splitting his forces to better avoid the Confederate defenses and riding on himself with little more than one hundred men. Late that night, Colonel Dalhgren had ridden into an ambush near Mantapike in King and Queen County, and in a quick exchange of fire, the dashing young officer had been shot and killed.
The Confederates stripped him and dumped his corpse over a fence to protect it from hogs roaming the road, and the next morning, they fashioned a rough pine coffin and buried the slain officer where he had been killed, at a crossroads in a slushy, muddy hole about two feet deep.
Though Colonel Dahlgren was the only man killed in the skirmish, all but twenty-one of his companions were taken prisoner and one hundred horses were captured. The men were marched into Richmond and confined within Libby Prison, where many prominent citizens were allowed to visit them for the sole purpose of disparaging and castigating them in person. Lieutenant Ross later told Lizzie that Mrs. Seddon, the wife of the secretary of war, had screeched insults at the men—“Thieves! Murders! Fiends! Hell monsters! Assassins!”—and had declared that she would use all the influence she possessed to see the men hanged, and if she could not accomplish that, she would have them thrown into dungeons and starved to death.
Over the next few days, the Richmond press and the rumor mill ran rampant with stories of the failed raid, and the death of the handsome young Yankee provoked a particular fascination that Lizzie found disrespectful and gruesome even as she too pored over every painful detail. Three days after his death, a shocking report appeared in the
Enquirer
claiming that a thirteen-year-old member of the home guard had searched Colonel Dahlgren’s person for valuables shortly after he was killed, and discovering a cigar case, a memorandum book, and several folded documents, he dutifully passed them on to his teacher, who was also his commander. The papers included a schedule for the raid, a checklist of assignments, special orders for different groups within the party, and an address Colonel Dahlgren had delivered to his men at headquarters before they embarked on their mission. The papers and memoranda, the newspaper trumpeted, contained “the indisputable evidence of the diabolical designs of the enemy,” which they revealed in long excerpts from the offensive documents. “We hope to release the prisoners from Belle Island first,” Colonel Dahlgren had written in his address, “and having seen them fairly started, we will cross the James River into Richmond, destroying the bridges after us and exhorting the released prisoners to destroy and burn the hateful city; and do not allow the rebel leader Davis and his traitorous crew to escape.” In his special orders and instructions, the colonel had exhorted, “The prisoners loose and over the river, the bridges will be secured and the city destroyed. The men must keep together and well in hand, and once in the city it must be destroyed and Jeff Davis and cabinet killed.”
Richmond exploded in outrage. Their worst accusations about the inhumanity of President Lincoln and his generals had been confirmed. In plotting the assassination of President Davis and his cabinet, the Yankees had provided irrefutable proof that they were barbarians, too cowardly, unprincipled, and vile to abide by the accepted rules of warfare.
Lizzie could not believe it. If the Dahlgren Papers existed—and she had not seen them, so she had no reason to believe that it was not all a complete fiction—they were surely forgeries, invented to incite and infuriate all of rebeldom and bring shame upon President Lincoln, his cabinet, and his generals. The raiders had been under orders to capture the Confederate leaders, not to kill them, but Colonel Dahlgren’s shocking execution of his Negro guide, who had probably acted in all innocence, made the wild claims all the more believable.
Truth or lie, the effects of the revelations were immediate. The day after the shocking orders appeared in the Richmond dailies, Colonel Dahlgren’s body was dug up and transported to the York River Railroad Depot, where vast crowds of the curious came to gape at it. Appalled, Lizzie stayed away, and she was sickened by a description of the spectacle that appeared in the
Whig
two days later:
DAHLGREN’S BODY.
—The body of Col. Ulric Dahlgren, killed in the swamps of King and Queen, by the Ninth Virginia Cavalry, was brought to the city Sunday night, and laid at the York River depot during the greater part of the day yesterday, where large numbers of persons went to see it. It was in a pine box, clothed in Confederate shirt and pants, and shrouded in a Confederate blanket. The wooden leg had been removed by one of the soldiers. It was also noticeable that the little finger of the left hand had been cut off. Dahlgren was a small man, thin, pale, and with red hair and a goatee of the same color. His face wore an expression of agony.
About 2 o’clock P.M. the corpse was removed from the depot and buried—no one knows, or is to know, where.
Mother was so appalled by the outrages committed upon the young man’s body that she wept. “They took his artificial leg?” she choked out, disbelieving, shoving the newspaper to the far end of the sofa as if distance would erase the ghastly images from her mind’s eye. “They cut off his finger? Why?”
“According to the
Examiner
, to claim the precious ring that encircled it,” Lizzie said tightly as she paced the length of the parlor. “They say it was something of the curse he came to bestow upon others, visited upon himself. Those forged papers have maddened the people, and they are so used to inflicting wrath upon their slaves that they believe every offense must be answered with violence.”
“His poor father,” Mother lamented. “His family, his friends. How will they ever cease mourning? They were denied the right to keep vigil by his body. They will never know where he has been laid to rest. They will never be able to visit his grave and see that it is properly tended. It is...it is uncivilized and cruel!”
“Their hatred has overpowered their reason.” Lizzie was too angry to weep, too offended to lament. She had seen too many good Union men denied a proper burial, refused the rites of their faiths and creeds. The men flung into pits like offal after the Battle of Bethel Church. The hasty and quiet funeral of Mr. Huson. The countless corpses dropped into shallow holes on Belle Isle a mere few yards away from their dying comrades. Colonel Dahlgren’s disrespectful treatment and ignominious burial were simply too much.
“We must find the hidden grave,” Lizzie declared, “and remove his honored dust to friendly care.”
This would be no small task, she knew, but the heart of every loyal Unionist had been stirred to its depths by the heinous mutilation of the young colonel’s corpse, and when she contacted her most trustworthy, intrepid agents to enlist their help, every one of them immediately agreed. Although Colonel Dahlgren had been denied a good death, they were resolved to see that he received a good interment, with all the proper rituals observed.
They knew that Colonel Dahlgren had been laid to rest outside Oakwood Cemetery, where all the Union dead were buried so as not to desecrate the hallowed ground where Confederate soldiers were interred, but they did not know which of the unmarked graves belonged to him. Several of Lizzie’s deputies volunteered to find out where he lay, a task perilous in no small degree because Mr. Davis himself had warned the public, both in the press and before Congress, that no one was ever to know.
While the Unionists carefully cultivated their sources, the grieving Admiral Dahlgren repeatedly prevailed upon the Confederate agent of exchange to return his son’s remains to his bereaved family. At first the officials refused, and then they relented, and at the end of March, the admiral awaited the flag of the truce boat at Fort Monroe, expecting to receive his son’s casket only to be bitterly disappointed to discover that the rebels had reneged. A few days later, the Richmond
Examiner
jeered at the failed exchange, mocking both the request and the Confederate officials who had almost granted it.
THE BODY OF DAHLGREN.
—Northern papers hint significantly to the fact that the body of Ulric, the Hun, who lost his dog’s life in prosecuting an unholy crusade against Richmond, and who was buried with all the dishonours of war, is to be disinterred from its unknown grave, and delivered over into the embrace of an impious father, who has for months been striving, with all the ingenuity of a devil, to make a bon-fire of the peaceful homes of Charleston, South Carolina. What has become of the gusty pronunciamento of the Confederate Government, that Ulric Dahlgren’s body should be disclosed only by the trump of the last judgment? Butler’s trumpet call for it has been more potent than Gabriel’s, and behold he appeareth!
Not yet, Lizzie thought, stinging with anger from the malicious taunts. Colonel Dahlgren had not yet risen from his ignoble grave, but he would.
Even as rebel patrols were still rounding up Yankee stragglers and the newspapers were calling for the captured raiders to be summarily executed, the grocer F. W. E. Lohmann’s discreet inquiries around the city led him at last to an eyewitness. A workman had been out in the burying ground at midnight when the Confederates brought in Colonel Dahlgren’s coffin, and concealing himself behind a tree, he watched and waited until the men departed, and then carefully marked the grave.
Lizzie provided the sizable stack of Confederate bills required to persuade the man to divulge the site. In the midst of a fierce and frigid tempest on the night of April 6, more than a month after the colonel had been slain, Mr. Lohmann, his brother, and the workman unearthed the coffin, pried off the lid, and identified the body by its missing limb. Then the two brothers quickly loaded the coffin onto a mule-drawn cart and took it to Mr. Rowley’s farm, from whence they summoned certain trustworthy Unionist friends for the funeral.
When Lizzie, John, and their mother arrived at the Rowley farm the next morning, they discovered the coffin lying atop a makeshift catafalque in an outbuilding and Mr. Rowley keeping vigil nearby. “Oh, Mr. Rowley,” Lizzie said tearfully, taking his hand. “Such a mournful day.”
“But such a triumphant one too,” he replied, clasping his other hand over hers and managing a weary, encouraging smile. He had probably sat there all night, paying the slain officer the respect and honor he had been denied since the moment he had fallen.
Soon the Lohmann brothers arrived, bearing a metallic coffin that would provide a far more suitable resting place than the pine box the Confederates had cobbled together out in the field. Lizzie marveled that they had been able to procure one, since it was common knowledge that only one or two such fine caskets existed in Richmond anymore, but the brothers had proven themselves astonishingly resourceful. “God bless you for your courage,” she said fervently, shaking their hands in turn. “When I think of what would have become of you had you been discovered in the graveyard—” She pressed her lips together and shook her head, unable to continue.
“We weren’t observed, so you needn’t be troubled,” said the elder of the pair. “It is Mr. Rowley who needs our prayers now.”
Lizzie nodded, inhaling deeply. Mr. Rowley had volunteered to transport Colonel Dahlgren to his final resting place, the farm of a loyal Unionist near Hungary Station. It would be a perilous journey past the Confederate picket posts, which had been strongly reinforced to protect Richmond from any forthcoming Union raids.
Before long more Unionists arrived, among them Charles Palmer and Franklin Stearns, whom she knew well. When all were assembled, several of the gentlemen transferred the body from the pine box into the coffin, and with sad and sorrowful hearts, the mourners gathered around. Mr. Rowley led them in prayer, and a few of the men offered brief remarks, and as a final parting ritual, they cut off locks of his hair to be preserved as mementos for his father.