This is a tale about an attempted flag capture. Well, actually, it’s about an attempted brigade capture with a Confederate flag in the middle. On August 21, 1864, at the Battle of Globe Tavern, a Union officer attempted to arrest an entire Confederate brigade, only to be thwarted at the last minute by a desperate Confederate officer and his handy revolver. In the immediate aftermath—and for years afterward—this incident became the battle’s most talked about event.
The Globe Tavern surrender incident involved
two important characters: Brig. Gen. Johnson Hagood (whose brigade tried to surrender) and Captain Dennis Burke Dailey (who attempted to convince
Hagood’s men to surrender).
Civil War enthusiasts might already know a little bit about these
men. Hagood was a plantation owner, born on February 21, 1829, in Barnwell,
South Carolina. In 1847, he graduated from the South Carolina Military Academy, and
when the Civil War commenced, he was among the first men from his state to
volunteer for Confederate military service. (He even participated in the bombardment of Fort Sumter.) In July
1862, Hagood received a promotion to brigadier general, and he oversaw the burial
of the dead after the July 18, 1863, Battle of Battery Wagner. Infamously, he
refused to return the body of Col. Robert Gould Shaw to Union lines,
earning the ire of a generation of abolitionists. In the spring of 1864, his
brigade reinforced Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia. Thus, in the war’s
last year, Hagood found himself in the thick of things at the Siege of Petersburg.
The other character, Captain Dailey, was born in County
Galway, Ireland, on November 15, 1839. In 1845 or 1846, he immigrated to the United States with
his parents, likely driven out of his homeland by the potato blight. He graduated
from Antioch College in Ohio, and on April 18, 1861, enlisted in the ranks of
Company B, 2nd Wisconsin Infantry. He participated in many of the 2nd
Wisconsin’s major battles, and by the summer of 1864, he served on the staff of
Brig. Gen. Lysander Cutler, a division commander in the 5th Corps.
Several years ago, historian David Silkenat published a book
entitled, Raising the White Flag: How
Surrender Defined the American Civil War. As implied by its subtitle,
Silkenat’s book argued that the concept of surrendering was endemic to American
ideas about war, and despite its persistent ambiguities, it formed the primary
interpersonal relationship between the warring factions of the Civil War. That is to say, if
Union and Confederate soldiers encountered each other in battle, one of two events
happened: they killed each other, in which case, no social interaction
occurred; or, one side surrendered, forcing the other side to assume the
role of captor.
I won’t venture to say whether or not Silkenat’s thesis is correct—I’ll leave that for readers to decide on their own—but I would like to say a word about his thesis’s relationship to the Globe Tavern surrender incident. You see, the relationship is nonexistent. Silkenat did not mention it. This surprised me, given the incident’s prominence in the memory of Civil War veterans. Surely, it warranted analysis and it would have assisted Silkenat’s purpose of explaining the growing sense of “un-Americanness” attached to the act of surrendering. As the Globe Tavern incident demonstrated, even though the surrender of the entire brigade could have spared Hagood’s Confederates a grisly fate, Hagood could not stomach the thought of his men obeying the orders of an enemy officer. To stop his men from raising the white flag, he shot Dailey through the side.
In essence, this is a tale about the ambiguities of
surrender, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a tale of two officers: an Army
of the Potomac officer who risked his own life to grant mercy to his foes, and
a Confederate general who took advantage of that mercy.
This is a long tale, so it’s in several parts:
PART 1: THE BATTLE OF GLOBE TAVERN
PART 2: THE ATTACK OF HAGOOD’S BRIGADE
PART 3: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE 27TH SOUTH CAROLINA’S FLAG
PART 4: THE POSTSCRIPT
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| This is Dennis Burke Dailey, shown as second lieutenant in the 2nd Wisconsin. |
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| This is Brigadier General Johnson Hagood. |
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