Civil War History Anchored by National Bank Notes
From Manassas to Appomattox, Peter Huntoon connects pivotal Civil War battles through rare National Bank notes issued in the towns where history was made.
I recently asked my oftentimes collaborator, Lee Lofthus, if he had a suitable note for the Reader’s Showcase. He immediately sent a pair of 1929 notes, consisting of a type 1 and a type 2, from The National Bank of Manassas, Virginia, along with a photograph of the bank, but without explanation. Of course, this was the site of the first battle of the Civil War, often referred to as the first Battle of Bull Run.
I then recalled that he also flashed a Gettysburg note around in one of his presentations a few years ago. That notorious battle represented the turning of the tide of the war firmly in the favor of the Union, so I requested a photograph of it as well.
The Manassas and Gettysburg photographs were too good to simply relegate to the Reader’s Showcase. There was a viable theme here, with nationals from sites of pivotal Civil War battles, such as Manassas, being one bookend to the conflict.
As this collecting theme began to grow on me, the next natural item would be from Appomattox, which, for all intents and purposes, represented the end of the war when General Lee surrendered his Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant. Appomattox was the closing bookend to the war.
I recalled that Appomattox, located a couple of miles west of Appomattox Court House, had a bank, so I asked Lofthus if he had one of those as well. Of course he did. This was opening an interesting door. I was solidly onto one of his collecting pursuits, and he was onto me, having caught on.
He then asked if I wanted to see his most prized note in the collection, a bill commemorating Grant’s horrible siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Along came this photograph of a splendid 1902 red seal from that town
Clearly, by the time he acquired this jewel, this collecting theme had matured to the point he was willing to reach for a more high-powered note than another “Series of 1929.” He had the nucleus of a neat collection, and I had a viable story for this publication. Let’s take a cursory look at what we have here.
Manassas, 32 miles west and a bit south of Washington, DC, in 1861 was little more than a junction between two railroads, one that led to Richmond, producing a strategic vulnerability that the Union wished to exploit. On July 21, Union and Confederate forces, ultimately totaling about 18,000 troops each, met there for the first major battle of the war. A bit of circus prevailed, as citizens and some legislators followed the Union troops from Washington to see the show, confident of a quick success.
The Union army, led by General Irvin McDowell, faced off against the Confederates led by General Joseph E. Johnston, who was joined later in the day by a contingent that arrived by rail, led by General P.G.T. Beauregard. The Union forces were outmaneuvered, resulting in a rout where the disorganized Union troops fled back to Washington. Fortunately for them, the Confederates didn’t possess the wherewithal to follow and finish them off. The significance of the battle lay in the sobering fact that the Confederates were deadly serious and committed, indicating that the Civil War would be prolonged and brutal.
The Confederates didn’t linger in Manassas. By 1862, the Union had established a major supply depot there. Between August 28 and 31, 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee mounted a major assault against the Union army under Major General John Pope, whose forces defended the place. This engagement was far larger than the First Battle of Manassas, involving approximately 77,000 Union and 50,000 Confederate troops. Notable events favoring the Confederates were a massed Confederate artillery barrage that devastated a Union assault and a counterattack involving 25,000 Confederates orchestrated by Major General Longstreet, the largest simultaneous mass assault of the war. Once again, the Union army was pushed back toward Washington in defeat.
This stuff was serious. In round numbers, we are talking about Union and Confederate casualties at 2nd Manassas, numbering respectively 14,400 and 7,300, of which 1,750 and 1,100 were killed.
My take is that Lofthus associates his type 1 Manassas with the 1861 battle and his type 2 with the 1862 battle. The Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, pitted Union General George G. Meade against Confederate General Robert E. Lee July 1–3, 1863. Suffice it to say that this horrific engagement marked the turning point of the war in favor of the Union. The statistics are staggering; estimates vary. The Union and Confederates engaged, with respective numbers of 93,500–104,256 and 65,000–80,000; casualties were 23,049 and 23,000–28,000, respectively.
One statistic claimed that the Gettysburg townspeople tended 22,000 wounded after the smoke cleared. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust reported that the battlefield was strewn with 6,000,000 pounds of human and animal carcasses. Bodies and skeletons appeared from shallow graves after the rain.
The Union’s war of attrition finally claimed Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac on April 9, 1865. The surrender followed a brief battle at Appomattox Court House, located 2 miles east of the town of Appomattox, in which the Confederates, 28,000 strong, faced off against 63,000 Unionists.
The Civil War claimed 618,000 lives: 204,000 on the battlefield and 414,000 from diseases, starvation, etc. Two out of every 100 of us died in that war.
You may also like:
