Civil War Stories
In a 1901 article, the New York Times declared that Robert E. Lee saved the union in 1865 by opposing the proposed guerrilla war and by preaching and practicing reconciliation, despite his personal feelings ["The Private Thoughts of a Southern Icon," July 2-9]. Without Lee's influence, the South could have turned into an early-day Iraq. Surely, saving the union exonerates Lee for any transgressions he committed during his life. Regarding the slavery question, the eminent historian Emory M. Thomas wrote in Robert E. Lee: A Biography that Lee's "abhorrence of slavery in the abstract probably placed Lee among more enlightened Americans." Historians say Lee is one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures.
WILLIAM A. WEINRICH
Tulsa, Okla.
Thank you for your article on Kit Carson and the Navajos during the Civil War ["An Enemy Overlooked"]. Carson also started a trading post in eastern Colorado that grew into a town named after him. The city of Kit Carson is located between Wild Horse and Cheyenne Wells, Colo. Though there are no monuments to the man, the town celebrates Kit Carson Day each year on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.
SARA BLEDSOE
Sterling, Colo.
The man who would shape the future of War described Gen. William T. Sherman's 1864 March to the Sea as blazing a new strategy. Donn Piatt, famous editor and proprietor of the Capital, a Washington weekly paper in the 1870s, emphasized that Sherman's march left open the possibility of a Confederate attack northward toward the Ohio Valley, a possibility that Confederate Gen. John B. Hood seized on, until his defeat at Nashville by Union Gen. George H. Thomas. Piatt reported that Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussian commander who defeated Austria in 1866 and France in 1870-71, told an American officer that Sherman's march had been successful because no enemy was in the way to make it perilous. Having no objective point, in a military sense, to make such a movement advisable...it was by the merest accident that the enemy did not regain through that movement of the United States Army all that had been secured through years of campaigning and hard fighting.
PETER BRIDGES
Crested Butte, Colo.
To understand General Sherman's way of war, one must be willing to look beyond the Civil War and examine his involvement in the Indian Wars. Gens. Grant, Sherman, and Philip Sheridan brought total war to Native Americans long before the Civil War.
WILLIAM J. CAREY
San Diego
In "The Golden Conspiracy," it was reported that prior to the discovery of gold in California, its "population consisted of at least 300,000 native Indians and only 700 foreigners." You failed to note that between 7,500 and 13,000 Spanish-speaking Californians lived in the Mexican frontier territory prior to the discovery of gold. The gold "that fueled the Union's economic engine during the Civil War" came at the expense of the Spanish-speaking Californians. As Leonard Pitt observed in Decline of the California's: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890, "the mines became the staging ground for widespread attacks on their ranchos and pueblos, the rehearsal place for broad-scale assaults on the Spanish-speaking."
RALPH H. VIGIL
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Corrections:
— Union surveillance balloons were inflated with hydrogen gas, not hot air as mentioned in "Secrets of the Civil War" [July 2-9].
— The photo of a dead soldier that accompanied "No Fortune for the War's Famous Photographer" [July 2-9] should have been attributed to Alexander Gardner and not used in the story.
This story appears in the August 6, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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