"In the Country of the Enemy": The Civil War Reports of a Massachusetts Corporal

Abstract

the Country of the Enemy: The Civil War Reports of a Massachusetts Corporal. Edited by William C. Harris. Foreword by John David Smith. New Perspectives on the History of the South. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 1999. Pp. xvi, 215. $29.95, ISBN 0-8130-1678-9.) These eyewitness accounts provide valuable descriptions of combat, camp life, interaction with southern civilians, and other aspects of life in the ranks of the Union army in the Civil War. The editors of all three books analyze the significance of the documents included and effectively orient the reader by using extensive primary and secondary sources. In the Country of the Enemy presents the dispatches of Corporal Zenas T. Haines of the 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Haines was a veteran reporter whose dispatches were published in the Boston Herald and as a book in 1863. His nine-month regiment served in eastern North Carolina from October 1862 to June 1863. Haines described the battle of Rawle's Mill, General John G. Foster's Goldsboro campaign, and the defense of Fort Washington against the siege of Confederate General Daniel H. Hill. His reports of fighting are rather brief; he went into greater detail on such subjects as food, weather, and the local people. He displayed an unusually keen fascination with African Americans. In New Bern and nearly every place the regiment marched, they were welcomed by crowds of blacks, smiling and waving their arms in a holiday mood. Former slave women set to work in their shanties, preparing hoe-cakes, roast sweet potatoes, and sage tea for the Union men. An elderly black man at one village stood by the road repeating: `We've long wished you well, but we daren't show it!' (p. 88). Haines applauded the fighting spirit of black recruits and noted that they swore to sell their lives as dearly as possible (p. 152). In the Country of the Enemy is one of the most important primary sources on the eastern North Carolina campaign, from the Union side. Jottings from Dixie publishes for the first time in book form Sergeant Major Stephen F. Fleharty's fifty-five dispatches to the Rock Island, Illinois Argus, and, beginning in June 1863, to the Rock Island Weekly Union. Fleharty, of the 102nd Illinois Infantry, was a teacher, printer, and clerk with strong powers of observation and extraordinary writing ability. He described his regiment's first duty in the defense of Kentucky against General Braxton Bragg's invasion, and then their guarding, from October 1862 to April 1863, of the Union rear in Kentucky and Tennessee from raids by Confederate General John Hunt Morgan. Fleharty related how frustrating it was to chase Morgan's cavalry with infantry and pointed out accurately that additional mounted Union men were needed. He also noted the reception Union troops received from African Americans. While visiting the Hermitage in February 1864, Fleharty met an elderly former slave of Andrew Jackson. She pointed to Abraham Lincoln's portrait on the wall, and said: That is Old Massa Linkum. [H]e seems to be doing great things, but some says not, yet I likes him mighty well (p. 157). Fleharty's regiment fought in Joseph Hooker's corps during William T. Sherman's Atlanta campaign. …