behind AotW

I had a kind email from the g-g-granddaughter of Oliver D. Green, medal of honor recipient and staff officer at Antietam. She corrected my error on AotW in his middle name (it’s Davis). I’m very glad she brought him to my attention.

Oliver Davis Greene

A career Regular Army officer from west-central New York State, Oliver Davis Greene graduated from West Point in 1854 and saw duty in the West with the 2nd US Artillery Regiment. At the start of the War in 1861 he was 1st Lieutenant, Battery G, and was in action as the battery’s commander at First Bull Run in July. He was then assigned as Captain and Assistant Adjutant General (AAG) on Major General Don Carlos Buell’s staff.

In that service Captain Greene made a powerful enemy: Andrew Johnson, then military governor of Tennessee. In 1864, of course, Johnson was elected Vice-President of the United States, and became President himself on Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.

It was at Nashville in the summer of 1862 that Greene and Johnson bumped heads …

I was first introduced to the legendary soldiers of the Late Unpleasantness as a new Civil War reader in the 1960s. Lee, Jackson, and Stuart; Grant and Sherman, certainly, but also more accessible lesser deities like Mosby, Pelham, Forrest, Semmes, and Gordon. For the generations before mine, particularly in the South, those and dozens more were household names. Today, most beyond the Big 5 are largely unknown.

JH Chamberlayne in Confederate Uniform
From an oil portrait by John Elder

One of the heroes I remember from that period, and still find often in my reading, was the young artillerist John Hampden (Ham) Chamberlayne (1838-1882). I expect his prominence is due to a collection of his war-era letters published by his son in 1932. These letters are quoted in later works on the Civil War in the East, as well.

He may not have been well known during the War, but his letters have helped make him immortal. Let me see if I can put some flesh on his bones.

Rev. Robert Hall Morrison, DD (from Davidson College portrait)

The Reverend Doctor Morrison (1798-1889) was father-in-law to three Confederate general officers: D.H. Hill (m. Isabella S. Morrison 1848), Rufus C. Barringer (m. Eugenia 1854; she d. 1858, typhoid), and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (m. Mary Anna 1857).

I know of no other patriarch of that distinction.

Hard core students of the American Civil War already know that D.H. Hill and “Stonewall” Jackson were brothers-in-law, though not always happily so. Most will probably not have seen how wide that family net spreads.