Unfriendly Fire

Three murdered Civil War generals—and the guys who got away with it

by

Death was busy during the Civil War. Bloody grinding clashes like Antietam, Shiloh, and Gettysburg killed tens of thousands of men in a day, though even these appalling numbers couldn’t compare to the relentless whittling away typhoid fever, dysentery, and other ailments performed on both armies. Hunger carried some away, as did exposure to winter. And, unsurprisingly, a few died simply because they were involved in personal struggles that turned violent. During the course of the Civil War, three generals—the Confederacy’s Earl Van Dorn and John Austin Wharton and the Union’s Bull Nelson—died not to preserve the Union or to advance secession, not to free the slaves or keep them in chains, but simply because they had, for whatever reason, enraged someone on their own side. 

The most prominent of the three generals to die from unfriendly fire off the battlefield was the Confederacy’s Earl Van Dorn. Short but handsome in the startlingly mustachioed way of the era, Van Dorn had fought well against Mexico and the Comanche before the outbreak of the Civil War. Artistically inclined and somewhat of a poet and painter in peacetime, Van Dorn designed his own (admittedly pretty) battle flag for troops under his command to carry into battle. 

Though a good soldier, his generalship was less impressive. Van Dorn’s attempt to invade Missouri and capture St. Louis led to a Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge; in a perversely inspiring fit of self-confidence, he defended the failure to take Missouri and the resulting danger to Arkansas with the words “I was not defeated, but only foiled in my intentions.” His later defeat in his attempt to retake Corinth, Mississippi, was mitigated only by the Union commander’s reluctance to pursue him; the pressure thus relieved allowed Federal troops to turn their attention toward Vicksburg.

... in a perversely inspiring fit of self-confidence, he defended the failure to take Missouri and the resulting danger to Arkansas with the words “I was not defeated, but only foiled in my intentions.”

Removed from major command after these incidents, Van Dorn was eventually made cavalry commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee in early 1863 and promptly tried to fight a duel with General Bedford Forrest, a better tactician than Van Dorn but, as a subsequent early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, also a man who probably more deserved to be shot. 

The dashing Van Dorn, nicknamed at one point “the terror of ugly husbands,” had some time on his hands in Tennessee and spent much of it with the pretty young wife of a local doctor and member of the state’s Confederate legislature, George Peters. On May 7, 1863, Peters, apparently a more impassioned husband than Confederate, came to Van Dorn to get a pass to go through Confederate lines on some state errand; as Van Dorn bent to write it, Peters shot him in the head. He was never punished, and though he and his wife divorced, they reunited in Arkansas, where Peters had acquired some land. Van Dorn’s sister, in a memoir written decades after the war, accused Peters of acting for the stability of the Union as much as his marriage—and Emily Van Dorn Miller hasn’t been the only one to suspect a more complex story than mere adultery.

On May 7, 1863, Peters, apparently a more impassioned husband than Confederate, came to Van Dorn to get a pass to go through Confederate lines on some state errand; as Van Dorn bent to write it, Peters shot him in the head.

Another veteran of the campaigns for northern Mississippi had been murdered the previous year. William “Bull” Nelson, a prominent Kentuckian credited with helping keep that vital state from going gray, had led an exciting life before the war, fighting at the Siege of Veracruz in the Mexican War, escorting an exiled Hungarian revolutionary around the United States, and participating in the approximate repatriation of illegally captured slaves to Africa, if not to the actual part of Africa they had been taken from. His troops had been among the first to enter Corinth as it fell to Union forces in 1862. 

The aptly-nicknamed Nelson had a personality as big as his frame. Among his eccentricities was an apparently ferocious distaste for the people of Indiana, whom he considered “trash” and blamed for, among other sins real and imagined, the Union loss at the Battle of Richmond, Kentucky. The troops of Indiana were aware of the general’s state-spanning rancor; rumor had it they aimed to retaliate at the next battle. Still, he appointed an Indianan, the unluckily-named Jefferson C. Davis, to oversee the defenses of the city of Louisville, only to send him packing when Nelson’s query about preparations was met with a glib “I don’t know.” 

The aptly-nicknamed Nelson had a personality as big as his frame. Among his eccentricities was an apparently ferocious distaste for the people of Indiana, whom he considered “trash” and blamed for, among other sins real and imagined, the Union loss at the Battle of Richmond, Kentucky.

Davis went home to Indiana but made his way back to Louisville in the company of Indiana’s governor. Tempers flared when Davis confronted Nelson in a hotel lobby; the Indianan called for a pistol… and wouldn’t you know, an Indiana-born attorney nearby obliged. Davis shot Nelson, who lasted long enough to call for baptism before expiring half an hour later. (He also managed to get one more dig in at Davis during the spar, calling the latter, “you damned puppy.”) Arrested but never charged, Davis later expressed regret for the murder, in part because it prevented him from advancing in the military—though he did ultimately earn a more reputable mention in the history books, serving as the first military governor of Alaska after it was purchased from Russia in 1867.

The final off-battlefield end of a Civil War commander was that of John Austin Wharton, a Texan who’d fought with distinction at Shiloh and Chickamauga, as well as in the ill-fated Confederate invasion of Kentucky that had vexed Nelson before his death. On April 6, 1865—a mere three days before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse—Wharton was arguing with a fellow Confederate army officer named George Wythe Baylor about a proposed reorganization of the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederate war effort. Even in isolated Texas, which had been cut off from the rest of the Confederacy for nearly two years, one can imagine the men might have realized the point would soon become moot; nevertheless, the interaction grew heated, and Wharton slapped Baylor and called him a liar. Baylor drew his revolver and shot Wharton, who was unarmed, dead on the spot. Baylor, whose brother had been so violent toward the Native population that Jefferson Davis had removed him as Confederate governor of Arizona, went on to coordinate anti-Apache operations with the Mexican government as a Texas Ranger before being elected to the Texas House of Representatives for El Paso; he died in 1916, fifty-one years after Wharton’s murder, ostensibly repentant but ultimately unpunished.

None of the three assailants faced any significant legal action for the murders, in part because of the chaos of wartime and in part because of the then-prevalent, still-not-unknown belief that a man of a certain class could reasonably shoot someone who had insulted or cuckolded him. None of these deaths could really have altered the course of the war the way, for example, Stonewall Jackson’s friendly-fire exit in the wake of Chancellorsville probably did; Nelson and to a lesser extent Van Dorn might have contributed to their respective causes, but neither was a Sherman, a Grant, a Lee, or a Lincoln. If the fate of these three generals provides anything beyond a grimly amusing footnote to a terrible war, it is a reminder that our greatest struggles are fought by individuals, with all the eccentricity and fallibility that implies.

Some of them are even from Indiana.  

Further reading: 

The Civil War Daily Gazette: civilwardailygazette.com

Texas State Historical Association: tshaonline.org

“Van Dorn’s Wild Ride,” Part of the New York Times’ “Disunion” project: opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/van-dorns-wild-ride