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"History books afford only lifeless and unrevealing data; they provide no glimpse of the living and breathing form, the "blood of history."  To understand this, we must explore old letter-chests and closets, examine dusty artifacts and portraits:  in presence of these objects, the past again revives in some degree."  John Esten Cooke (1885).

 

Lt. Colonel James Calvin Councill,

26th Virginia Infantry

Presentation Foot Officer's Sword

by

Boyle and Gamble,

Richmond, Virginia.

Captured by Captain George

Naylor Julian, 13th New Hampshire

Infantry,

Before Petersburg,

June 15, 1864

 

 

The story of the Councill sword initially focuses on the document transcribed in the frame to the right from the archives of the King and Queen (Virginia) Historical Society. Councill had been assigned command of two companies of the 26th Virginia to guard the approaches to Richmond in October, 1862, in the vicinity of Providence Forge.  The war had moved from the Peninsula to northern Virginia, thus this assignment would be relatively easy for the command.  Nevertheless, Councill administered his assignment with efficiency and a just concern for the soldiers assigned to him, many of which were also neighbors and students of his in antebellum St. Stephens Church, a rural community in King and Queen County.

Councill was a 35 year old teacher at the beginning of the war. He was a native of Portsmouth, Virginia, from a family whose presence in Tidewater Virginia reached back into the seventeenth century. He was educated at the Virginia Military Institute, graduating second in his class of  1848. He returned to eastern Virginia and became a mathematics teacher at Fleetwood Academy at St. Stephens Church.  There he met and married Mary Ellen Smith of "Smithfield," a member of the distinguished Fleet family of that county.  In 1858, Fleetwood Academy closed, and Councill decided to purchase land and start a school for boys soon thereafter.  The school was named Aberdeen Academy, and except for the four years of Civil War, Aberdeen would flourish under Councill's leadership for the rest of the nineteenth century.

With the coming of the war, in 1861 Councill closed Aberdeen and began the task of raising a company of volunteers.  At that time, a company of men consisted of around one hundered men from the vicinity in which the company was raised.  Councill's company christened itself "The Jackson Greys," named after James Jackson, the Alexandria business owner involved in the Elmer Ellsworth affair (an tragic incident which inflamed passions on both sides early in the war).  Kinsman and former student Fred Fleet describes the early days of the company:  "With the consent of my father and mother, I at once enlisted in Captain Councill's company, and perhaps because I had had some experience in drilling both at Fleetwood and Rumford Academies, I was made first sergeant of the company.  The uniforms were soon completed, the company was ordered to report at St. Stephen's, where we formed and marched to West Point, and thence took a sailing vessel and in due time reached Gloucester Point and were mustered into the service of the Confederate States as Company "I," Twenty-sixth Regiment of Virginia Volunteers."

                                                         Camp 26th Va. Regiment, Wise's Brigade

                                                             Burton's Farm, Feb. 16, 1863

Lieut. Col. J.C. Councill:

Dear Sir:

     We. the committee on the part of the officers and men of Companies "B" and "C," 26th Virginia Regiment, being desirous of expressing to you in some tangible and material mode our high appreciation of your qualities as an officer, as well as our regard for you as a gentleman, beg that you will accept as a befitting and enduring testimonial of our esteem the accompanying sword.

     During the four weeks that we were under your immediate command in the county of New Kent, we had full and ample opportunities of discerning and testing in you those qualities which adorn the soldier and the gentleman.  Prompt, active and vigilant in the discharge of every duty; strict, but impartial, in discipline; calm and cool in danger, are some of the traits which you have shown yourself to possess in an eminent degree.  It is these qualities which have excited our admiration, and we hereby manifest the sincerity of our regard in tendering this sword.  Accept it, then, as the honest and sincere expression of the confidence and admiration of your comrades in arms. 

     We know that in your hands it will never be drawn but in the defence of right and justice, and NEVER SHEATHED IN DISHONOR.

                                                         Very respectfully,

                                                         Captain P.H. Fitzhugh, Cot. B.

                                                         Captain N.B. Street,      "    C.

                                                         Sergeant F.H. Wolfe,    "     B.

                                                         Sergeant J.R. Thurston,  "    C.

                                                         Private J.W. White,        "    B.

                                                         Private G.F. Fleet,          "   C.

Typed transcribed letter in the collection of the King and Queen Historical Society, King and Queen Courthouse, Virginia.

   

 

Councill's Reply

Capt. P.H. Fitzhugh, Co. B, Capt. N.B. Street, Co. C, Sergeants F.H. Wolfe, J.R. Thruston, and Privates J.W. White and G.F. Fleet, 26th Virginia Reg't:

Gentlemen:

I have this day the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your highly complimentary communication, accompanying an elegant sword, presented to me through you, by the officers and men of Companies B. and C. 26th Va. Reg't., a detachment which I had so recently the honor to command, while doing duty on the Lower Peninsula. 

This flattering manifestation of the esteem of my associates in arms, whilst exceedingly gratifying to me, is as unexpected as it is, in my estimation, undeserved.  I have not the vanity to imagine that any merit of mine entitles me to be the recipient of a testimonial so handsome, and at the same time so significant.  I can but feel indebted for this distinguishing mark of regard, to the generous impulse of an unbounded liberality, united to the promptings of warm personal attachment, which has been cherished and strengthened by the associations of nearly two years in the service of our country.  I accept the sword, gentlemen, and beg that you will return my warmest to your brother officers and men, by whom it has been so generously tendered.  With mingled feelings of pleasure and pride, I shall make it my constant companion whenever and wherever duty may call me.  On its trusty steel I stake reputation and life, in our present struggle for nationality and independence; and come what may, weal or woe, not a dishonoring stain shall ever dim the luster of its bright and spotless blade. 

Drawn in the cause of Southern liberty, I trust it will be a stranger to its scabbard, until every trace of the unprincipled enemy that would so iniquitously subjugate us is obliterated forever from our soil.

With many grateful feelings for the friendly and complimentary terms of your note, and with the highest esteem for you, and those whom you represent,

                                       I have the honor to be,

                                           Very respectfully,

                                               Your obedient serv't,

                                                    J. Calvin Councill

                                                       Lt. Col. 26th Va. Vols.

Typed transcribed letter in the collection of the King and Queen Historical Society, King and Queen Courthouse, Virginia.

The Battle of Battery Five before Petersburg

June 15, 1864.

The experience of the 26th Virginia until May, 1864, had been relatively free of battles and campaigns.  Duty on the Peninsula and in South Carolina had been the calling of former Virginia governor Henry Wise's Brigade, to which the 26th belonged. In mid-1864, all of that would change, and the experiences of the 26th in the Cold Harbor campaign, Siege of Petersburg and subsequent retreat to Appomattox were ones of continuous horrifying battle.  The 26th Virginia would lose its Lt. Colonel Councill (captured) and its Colonel Page (killed) in the first days of the Petersburg siege.  Councill would lose his sword and become a prisoner, but in captivity he would become one of what was known as "The Immortal 600," a legendary group of Confederate officers who would be placed under retaliatory "friendly" fire by their Union captors in a prison pen on Morris Island, at the mouth of Charleston (South Carolina) harbor. All of that would be in the near future, however, and the story returns to the opening action of the Petersburg siege, before either Grant or Lee arrived.  Captain George Naylor Julian of the 13th New Hampshire, a native of Exeter and graduate of Phillips Academy in that city, was Councill's Union counterpart.  Julian recounted details of the action in letters home (now in the collection of the University of New Hampshire) and the battle is described in the unit's regimental history authored by Julian's fellow officer S. Millet Thompson. 

Battery Five was  the principal earthwork on the old Dimmock Line overlooking the railroad and the Appomattox River northeast of Petersburg. The task of the Confederates who occupied that position was to block the main approach to the City of Petersburg and to delay a potentially overwhelming Union advance until the main Confederate army could arrive.  Councill and elements of his regiment had been assigned that position with artillery from Sturdivant's battery. On the Union side, Julian was ordered to advance under fire and capture the fort. In the advance that followed, Julian was particularly heroic, almost to the point of recklessness.  He was the first Union soldier to enter the fort after receiving a slight wound, and it was to Julian that Lt. Colonel Councill would surrender, as his small command was surrounded and cut off by the Union advance. Thompson, in his regimental history, described the aftermath:

"Eight Confederate officers in Battery Five surrendered to Capt. Julian, five of these eight are accounted for by their arms:  Lt. Col. Council, who was in command of the line of works.  His sword Capt. Julian still has, 1887, and it bears this inscription:  'Presented to Lieut. Col. Council By the Officers and Men of Companies B & C 26th Va. Regt. Jan. 1863.'  He received of another officer a sword, apparently a home-made affair, with the edge ground and whetted as sharp as a scyth.  This he gave to Sergt. James R. Morrison of K who still, 1887, preserves it as a relic.  Of another a revolver - Colt's - which he gave to Lieut. Murray.  Of another, a young naval officer, who was at Battery Five merely on a visit to friends for the day, and just down from Richmond, a revolver which he now has."

In the end, Capt. Julian's efforts were blunted by a pause in the Union advance.  Confederates were allowed to reform closer to the city, and the time lost allowed reinforcements to arrive from Lee's army, and so the war continued for the next ten months.

S. Millet Thompson, Thirteenth Regiment of New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865, A Diary Covering Three Years and a Day, page 389.