228 The American Civil War
cross-fire caught and pinned down Howard
and his friends. They had no option but to
hug the ground and wait for darkness. 'A
more disagreeable half hour,' he wrote in
retrospect, 'with a bullet striking a man lying
on the ground every now and then, could
not well have been spent.' Two days later a
Federal assault swept over the nose of the
Confederate works near the point soon to be
christened 'the Bloody Angle.' Yankee
bayonets surrounded Howard and he went
into a captivity that would last for six
months. Howard's concise sketch map of the
Angle at Spotsylvania remains an important
artifact for studying the battle.
As his captors herded Lieutenant Howard
to the rear at Spotsylvania, he began a prison
experience shared by hundreds of thousands
of Civil War soldiers. Howard wound up at
Fort Delaware, in the middle of the Delaware
river downstream from Philadelphia. There
he enjoyed reasonably civilized treatment, by
the uncivilized standards of the day. The
fort's commander liked Howard and others
of the Confederates, but some of his
subordinates took the opportunity to abuse
their power, as humans are wont to do. In
November 1864, Howard went back south
under a program for the exchange of
prisoners. Once released in Georgia, he used
a flask of brandy to bribe his way into a
good railroad car on a Confederate train
and by the end of 1864 had reached
Richmond again.
Through the war's waning weeks, young
Howard assisted General G. W. C. Lee in
the effort to turn an accumulation of
home-front troops, raw levies, and naval
ratings into a hodge-podge brigade for
emergency use. The emergency arose on
2 April 1865. The lieutenant was sitting in a
pew at St Paul's, where he had been
confirmed a few months earlier, for the
11.00 am Sunday service, when a courier
informed Jefferson Davis that the army's
lines had been broken. Richmond must be
abandoned. For four days the ersatz brigade
under G. W. C. Lee took part in the retreat
west and south from Richmond. In a mix-up
that especially depressed and horrified
Howard, the green troops loosed a volley
against friends that killed several men,
victims of mistaken friendly fire just a few
hours before the army surrendered.
Howard fell into enemy hands again on
6 April at Sayler's Creek. This time his prison
camp was Johnson's Island in Lake Erie.
There he took the oath of allegiance to the
United States on 29 May and made his long
way home. Awaiting him in Baltimore was a
demand, dated September 1862, that he
report to Yankee conscript officers to be
drafted into Federal service. Men had come
to his mother's house and asked the names
and occupations of all the family's males.
McHenry's mother responded that her
husband and eldest son were being held
unconstitutionally as political prisoners in
northern Bastilles. Four sons were serving in
the Confederate army. 'McHenry,' she told
her interrogators, was 'with Stonewall
Jackson and I expect he will be here soon.'
The officials wrote out the conscription
demand and left. McHenry kept the souvenir
the rest of his life.
Lieutenant Howard enjoyed a long and
fruitful career after the war. He completed
his legal training and practiced law in
Baltimore for decades, finding time also to
write extensively about his Confederate
experiences. McHenry's lively, urbane
recollections appeared in periodicals both
North and South. He eventually turned his
story into a charming and important - and
sizable, at 423 pages - book that is a classic
piece of Confederate literature: Recollections
of a Maryland Confederate Soldier and Staff
Officer under Johnston, Jackson and Lee
(Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company,
1914). Howard died in his native Maryland
on 11 September 1923, two months before
his eighty-fifth birthday.