Civil War Primer — by Pat Granstra

Despite the hardships imposed upon them,  only 44 of the Immortal Six Hundred died as a direct result of their maltreatment.  In June of 1865, Barney Cannoy and Junius Hempstead were among the survivors beginning their post-war lives.

Part III:  Civilians

Thousands of soldiers, both Union and Confederate, poured out of prisoner-of-war camps at the war’s end.  For rebel soldiers, release meant vowing allegiance to the United States.  When 17 of the Immortal Six Hundred chose to end the rigors of imprisonment on Morris Island and in Fort Pulaski by taking the oath, their fellow captives deemed them traitors, but by June of 1865 there was no longer a Confederate States of America to betray.  The remaining members of the Six Hundred, eager to put their miseries behind them, took the oath and headed for their respective homes.

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Remote Grayson County in southwest Virginia had been physically untouched by the war until December 1864, when Confederate cavalry under Brigadier General John C. Vaughn rode into it from North Carolina.  Vaughn’s purpose was to ride north and west to prevent Union General George Stoneman’s cavalry from destroying vital saltworks at Saltville and lead mines near Wytheville.  According to a letter written by Elk Creek resident Mastin Hail, Vaughn’s “four or five  hundred” cavalrymen were “rogues” who burned hundreds of fence rails, fed their horses from farmers’  haystacks, and stole grain and horses.  They were followed, says Hail, by “200 wagons and between one and two hundred cavelry [sic]”  who “stayed 4 or 5 days” in a woods, chopping and burning  a “full one third of the timber.”

The rebel “rogues” finally moved north but were defeated by Stoneman’s cavalry, who seized the wagon train and captured 200 soldiers.  The remainder of Vaughn’s men retreated southward across Grayson County, followed by Union cavalry.  According to Fannie Hale, the Yankees caused fewer problems for people in Cannoy’s home town of Elk Creek than had Vaughn’s men.  In a Christmas letter to her husband, a Confederate soldier, she wrote, “Vaughan’s [sic] men pester us right smartly. . . . The Yankees did not pester anything but Negroes and horses.  They took all of them they could get.” 

 Thus, 28-year-old Barney Cannoy was one of Virginia’s luckier veterans.  He had suffered no dibilitating wounds, and his body was regaining strength lost during imprisonment.   His wife, daughter, and son were waiting for him.  His home was as he left it in 1861.  His family, his farm, and his community would become the mainstays of his life.

 Cannoy returned to farming and soon took over operation of his father’s farm.  In a legal document, his father stipulated Barney should have “the tract where he [Barney] now resides” and “the remainer of my home place and dwelling after my death” after paying his siblings $1,000 for their tracts.  The elder Cannoy’s intent was to keep the family farm intact.

Ironically, the document is dated December 19, 1867, only ten days before Cannoy’s wife died, leaving him with three young children, a second son having been born in 1866.  Along with running the farm, the young veteran carried the burdens of grief and single parenthood.  However, in November of 1871,  Cannoy remarried.  He and his second wife became the parents of eleven children, ten of whom lived to adulthood.

Nineteenth-century farming left little time for recreation, but Cannoy did find time for his church, located approximately a mile from his home.  After the growing congregation built a new church, they dismantled the original, creating more room in the cemetery.  Cannoy expressed a desire to be buried where the pulpit of the original church had stood.

Education was another priority for Cannoy. The 1899-1900 “Annual Announcement of Elk Creek Academy, Ursus, Grayson County Va.” lists him as the school’s treasurer.  The preparatory school served students from the primary grades through high school and included a Normal Course for those desiring to become teachers.  The boarding school described its mission as developing the faculties of the mind rather than “cramming” it with mere facts and advertised itself as being “located in a community of well to do farmers who have the interest of the school at heart.”  Apparently Cannoy was such a farmer.

Concern for others was a part of Cannoy’s personality, a characteristic that may have been honed by his experience with the Immortal 600 and his own personal losses.  In a February 16, 1900 letter to one of his older sons then living in Oregon, Cannoy wrote that a younger son, nine-year-old Roy, had been ill for several weeks.  To cheer him, Cannoy had allowed newborn “lambs and a little calf ” to be brought to the house.   

Barney Cannoy’s life after the Civil War  focused on the future– raising children, raising crops, and raising animals.  He undoubtedly exchanged war stories with the many other veterans around Elk Creek, but he did not dwell on his months as a member of the Immortal 600.  His children simply told their children Grandpappy had been in the war and had been a prisoner.  He harbored no ill-will toward Northerners; many of his children moved to Oregon, Iowa, and Illinois.  He died on October 20, 1901 and was buried in Old Elk Creek Cemetery– at the site of the pulpit of the old church.

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Junius Hempstead returned to his parents’  home in Dubuque, Iowa, following his release from Fort Delaware.  As he recuperated,  the twenty-two year old struggled with planning his future.  Being a Confederate veteran in a northern city so soon after the war put him in a social limbo. Even  familial relationships were strained when, in December of 1865, his sister married a Union captain whose command in Colorado had been comprised of allegiance-shifting former Confederate prisoners.

With his future in doubt, Hempstead focused on his traumatic past.  He corresponded with fellow captive John Cantwell, who had compiled a list of the prisoners during their stint on Morris Island.  Apparently Hempstead asked for a copy of the list to include in a book he was writing about the Six Hundred, for he wrote Cantwell in November, saying, “I am so much obliged to you for the list of names . . . I have some three hundred and fifty pages and with the list will make four hundred.”  He chose, however, to delay publication, telling Cantwell “it is rather strong for the times and I would be run from the country.”  

Details of his life are sketchy, but Hempstead eventually left Dubuque and worked as bookkeeper in Chicago.  According to one source, poor health forced him to change his occupation. Ron Seymour, of the Dubuque County IAGenWeb, writes that Hempstead was living in Memphis and in “the Cotton business” in early 1871 and  that he also began a literary career about that time.  He was still living in Memphis when his father, the former Iowa governor, spent the winter of 1881-82 with Junius and his family.

Records indicate that Hempstead married Lavinia (Lillie) Blackburn on October 3, 1866, but do not give a location for the marriage.  Various internet sources show the couple had either four or five children. However, according to Seymour, “sometime in the 1880’s” Junius and Lillie “became estranged”  and  Hempstead relocated to Jennings, Louisiana in 1884.

Reasons for the breakdown of the marriage are unknown, but they may have been financial.  Hempstead published nine volumes of literature between 1880 and 1905,  none of them the prison record he told Cantwell was nearly completed in  1865.  The books consisted of two tragedies, three volumes of poetry, and four of fiction.  Although some of the material in these books may have been written prior to 1880, it appears that writing was consuming most of Hempstead’s time and that his role in the cotton industry had become minor or nonesistent. 

Very few authors in the nineteenth century actually supported themselves by writing. (Even the immensely popular Mark Twain resorted to lecturing.)   Although prolific and versatile, Hempstead was neither outstanding nor innovative.  In fact, he often seemed to openly imitate other writers.  Several short poems sing the praises of beautiful women in the manner of Edgar Allen Poe; one of them, “The Dead Lenore,” even uses the same name as the scholar’s desceased lover in “The Raven.”  Walt Whitman sang “the body electric,” and in “Electricity” Hempstead uses Whitman’s cataloging technique.  

Much of  Hempstead’s output appears related to his personal exeriences.  A poem describing a bookkeeper as “a galley slave chained to his oar”  strongly suggests his distaste for his job in Chicago.  The paired poems “Wanted– A Friend” and “To Junius L. Hempstead” depict the author as a lonely man.  Numerous poems speak of the horror of war and of old soldiers carrying  memories to their graves.  A novel, The Deschanos, deals with the early years of the Civil War. 

Family and fortune  may have slipped away from Hempstead, but the Civil War remained a constant in his life.  He became angry when VMI did not list him its alumni directory because he had not graduated.  He contended that even though he attended VMI for less than a year, he would have graduated if the war had not interfered.  He argued the “fourth class [freshmen] suffered by far (in dead and wounded) and fighting qualities more than the other three classes that went from the V.M.I.”   His reasoning persuaded the Alumni Association to include all VMI enrollees, no matter how short their time at the school, in the directory.

Although Hempstead never published a book about his captivity, he remained in touch with a fellow captive who did.  In 1891, John Ogden Murray, then a newspaper writer, began to locate and gather information from Hempstead and other survivors.  His The Immortal Six Hundred, published in 1905, brought the story of the captives before a nation-wide audience for the first time.  After the book’s publication, the survivors formed their own organization, the Society of the Immortal Six Hundred.  Hempstead served five years as its president.

 

 

After the mid 1880’s, involvement in veterans’ associations and the Society became the center of Hempstead’s life.  He died penniless in September 1920 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Jennings, Louisiana.

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Author’s Note

The stories of all the members of the Immortal Six Hundred deserve to be told.  I chose these two men, Junius Hempstead and Barney Cannoy, for personal reasons.  Like Hempstead, I am a native Iowan.  Cannoy was my great-grandfather.

John Ogden Murray hoped his book would generate funds to build a monument to the six hundred on Morris Island.  That hope went unfulfilled.  Given the present condition of Morris Island, it is unlikely that a monument will ever be erected there. 

However, on March 4, 2011, the Director of the National Park Service announced approval for the erection of a monument to the Immortal Six Hundred on the grounds outside Fort Pulaski.  Fundraising is underway, and contributions may be made via the Internet at www.600csa.com.

 

 Please also read

Part I: Soldiers 1860-1864

Part II:  Prisoners 1864-1865