Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
On the morning of Oct. 7, 1861, Thomas Webber, a 27-year-old private in the Confederate Army, and his younger brother Watkins strolled along the beach near their camp in the Florida Panhandle, reminiscing about their home and family in Mississippi as the waves lapped the shoreline. The walk boosted Tom’s morale. He had grown frustrated by inaction and idleness since he and his regiment, the Ninth Mississippi Infantry, had been dispatched to the Gulf coast months earlier. He considered quitting.
Less than 48 hours later, Watkins was killed in action.
The fight that cost Watkins his life occurred during a nighttime raid on Fort Pickens, on the western tip of Santa Rosa Island at the mouth of Pensacola Bay. Its Union garrison had held out against Confederate occupation for months, and the Southern officers had long since realized that a direct assault on it would be pointless. Instead, they resorted to a siege, combined with occasional raids.
Late on the night of Oct. 8, the Webber boys and more than 1,000 other soldiers crossed from the mainland and landed on the island a few miles from the fort undetected by Union patrols, “all thinking Pickens would soon be ours,” noted Tom in his journal. He continued, “I was chosen as a skirmisher and thrown out in front of the column.” He and others in the advance confronted pickets from the Sixth New York Infantry, who “fired Several shots at us two shots immediately at me.” They brushed the pickets off and marched on the New Yorker’s encampment outside the fort before dawn. “We went at a run encountering and killing a sentinel occasionally and on reaching the enemys camp found them flying everywhere. The camp & stores were soon burnt and recall sounded for us to return to the boat,” reported Tom.
But as they were headed back to the transport, Tom recalled, “a company of U.S. Regulars from ambush fired on us and my dear noble & gallant brother Watt fell mortally wounded and lived only a few minutes. Oh merciful God what a severe visitation.”
Watt’s death devastated Tom. “I have often thought my lot in life a hard one,” he wrote in his journal the next day. “I had so many severe trials & Sore troubles but would to God that I could live all my troubles over and have them aggravated to the full of human imagination if it would recall the life of my brother. Gladly would I die to restore him to life.”
Tom left his regiment and accompanied his brother’s body to Pensacola. With the help of friends “I succeeded in getting a splendid metallic burial case and suitable clothing for Watt’s burial,” he noted. “We had his corpse neatly and securely sealed in the case. Although it can be of no particular benefit to his remains yet how much more satisfied to know that he is well cared for and secured so that I can carry him home to be buried in a more hospitable land than this.”
Tom arrived at the home of his parents with Watt’s remains a few days later. The news had already reached his family. “May God spare me the agony of such a day as this,” he wrote. He met his grief stricken father, and “my dear Mother prostrate with this sad affliction. My three sisters & one brother dying of the grief which has so suddenly befell us.” He decided not to rejoin his unit; for a while, the war was over for Tom Webber.
Born in Tennessee, Tom had moved to Mississippi in the 1850s and established himself in Byhalia as postmaster and as a partner in a local dry goods store. Like many in northern Mississippi, he was a unionist, but when secession came he realized which way his allegiances had to shift. “It has been my political creed to try and arrest the calamities which now beset us,” he declared in March 1861,
But as we are in trouble we must meet like men. I notice though that men who stood by me and voted by my side for the Union as long as there was a hope of maintaining it … have been the first and most liberal in getting up volunteer companies and enlisting them for the maintenance of our rights. And the open and avowed Secessionists men who have been clamorous for secession for years Seem disposed to fold their arms and leave the work of defense to the men who gladly would have avoided the trouble and lived on in peace & quiet.
On March 4, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as president of a nation divided. Tom’s journal entry unequivocally stated where his loyalties lay: “Inauguration of the Black Republican Administration. Thank Heaven I am out of the Union.” Before the end of the month he enlisted as a private in the Jeff Davis Rifles, a locally formed company that later became part of the Ninth Mississippi Infantry. He refused pay for his service.
Tom emerged from the shadow of Watt’s death possessed with an almost fanatical sense of duty to the Confederate cause. He charged back into the war in 1862 with unbridled fury. He wrote home, “I have acquired a morbid fondness for action. Nothing short of being continually strained up to the full extent of my mental and physical capacities will satisfy me at all.” He closed with a phrase that could have been his motto: “Let it be Foreward! Foreward! Foreward!”
He soon recruited and became captain of a company of horse soldiers, boasting that his Mississippi boys were “of the finest material of the country.” The company joined the Second Kentucky Cavalry, under the command of Gen. John Hunt Morgan. The fiery Morgan referred to the Second as his “Regulars” out of respect for its fighting abilities. Tom quickly advanced to major of the regiment.
But if Tom was a passionate Southern soldier, he was remarkably compliant with the Union’s position on slavery. After President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, recalled Lee, a Webber family slave who accompanied Tom, “the major told me I was a free man, and could do as I please.” Lee stayed and served Tom.
On July 2, 1863, as battle raged in Gettysburg and the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg was on the verge of surrender, Tom and about 2,500 other horse soldiers hand-picked by Morgan rode from Kentucky on a raid into Indiana and Ohio. The gray troopers triggered alarm throughout the region.
The raid ended on July 19 after Union forces decisively defeated them as they attempted to cross the Ohio River into West Virginia at Buffington Island. Most of the Confederates were captured, But Tom and several others escaped. The survivors reorganized into two brigades; Tom took charge of the first and set about the task of getting home. Basil Duke, a respected officer and Morgan’s brother-in-law, later wrote that,
Worn down by tremendous and long sustained exertion, encompassed by a multitude of foes, and fresh ones springing up in their path at every mile, allowed no rest, but driven on night and day; attacked, harassed, intercepted at every moment, disheartened by the disasters already suffered — how magnificent was the nerve, energy and resolution which enabled them to bear up against all this and struggle so gallantly to the very last against capture.
Duke saluted Tom for his leadership. “He was one of the very best officers in the Confederate cavalry,” and noted, “of his conduct after the Buffington disaster, General Morgan, and his comrades spoke in enthusiastic praise — one officer in describing his unflinching steadiness called him the ‘Iron man.’”
The federals captured Tom two days after he took brigade command and held him as a prisoner of war at various locations in the North for more than a year. Soon after his imprisonment, Tom penned a strong commentary on the public debate about the treatment of black Union soldiers captured by Confederates in a letter to a friend. “Until the end of time, yes, until eternity has run its last round, rather than our Government shall acknowledge the doctrine of negro equality by an exchange of negro soldiers. I hope all negroes captured in arms and their officers may be hung.”
Federal authorities discovered the passage during a routine inspection of outgoing prisoner letters, and locked him in solitary confinement “for expressing sentiments hostile to the policy of the United States Government.”
In the summer of 1864, Tom and 54 other Confederate officers were sent under guard to Charleston Harbor to be placed before Union batteries on Morris Island — effectively human shields. The plan, a retaliatory measure ordered after a Confederate commander exposed a similar number of federal prisoners to fire from their own long-range guns, was not carried out. Tom and his comrades spent five weeks confined on a steamship in stifling heat. Finally, they were exchanged for 50 federal officers and released.
Tom headed to Virginia, where he fought through the fall of Richmond in April 1865; he then joined the escort of President Jefferson Davis as he fled the Confederate capital. He parted ways with the presidential party near Washington, Ga., a few weeks later, shortly before Davis was captured.
But the Confederate “Iron Man” wasn’t ready to quit just yet. He struck out with the remnants of his command for Texas to join the last standing Confederate Army. The troopers rode as far as Columbia, Miss., when they learned that those forces, E. Kirby Smith’s Trans-Mississippi Department, had surrendered. He disbanded his command and returned home. He married in 1866 and died three years later at age 35 of “softening of the brain” — probably a stroke.
Sources: Jim Power, “The 1861 Diary of Major Thomas B. Webber”; Jim Power, “The ‘Iron Man’ and the ‘Mississippi Company’ of Morgan’s Raiders”; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; Thomas W. Webber military service record, National Archives and Records Service; Civil War Times Illustrated Collection, United States Army Heritage and Education Center; Lee Webber Tennessee Confederate Pension Application, Tennessee State Library and Archives; Basil W. Duke, “A History of Morgan’s Cavalry”; Mauriel P. Joslyn, “Immortal Captives: The Story of 600 Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy”; 1870 Federal Mortality Schedule for Mississippi, National Archives and Records Service.
Ronald S. Coddington is the author of “Faces of the Civil War” and “Faces of the Confederacy.” His forthcoming book profiles the lives of men of color who participated in the Civil War. He writes “Faces of War,” a column for the Civil War News.