Letter to the Editor – July 21, A Date That Would Help Determine Anniston’s Future

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Date Submitted July 20, 2024
Kent Davis

Although Anniston was founded in 1872, many are not aware that its fate as a new municipality may have actually been decided eleven years earlier on a battlefield in northern Virginia. On July 21, 1861, near the town of Manassas, Virginia, to be exact, the first major battle of what has alternately become known as either the “Civil War” or the “War Between the States” (and other monikers depending on who is telling the story) was fought at great human cost. Those who visit the site of that battle, now operated by the National Park Service, are greeted by signs welcoming them to the Manassas Battlefield National Park. That federal park oddly honors the Confederate names for two major battles—the First and Second Battles of Manassas—that took place there. (The Union names for the battles were “Bull Run.”)

A prognosticator at the time might have predicted that a young Confederate officer heavily involved in the fighting at Manassas on July 21, 1861 would eventually come back to the area that would later become Anniston and play a part in its early history. John Pelham was born September 7, 1838, the third of seven (some say eight) children, with five brothers and a sister, to Dr. Atkinson and Martha Pelham at his grandparents’ home along Cane Creek near Alexandria, Alabama (then in Benton County, later to become Calhoun County in 1858). He grew up on the family’s 1,000-acre plantation there and in Jacksonville, and learned to ride horses at a young age.

In 1856 Local Congressman Sampson Willis Harris secured an appointment for Pelham to the United States Military Academy at West Point (N.Y.), and Pelham joined the only 5-year class in West Point history. On February 18, 1861, with U.S. President Lincoln having recently been elected and several Confederate states (including Alabama) having already seceded from the Union, Jefferson Davis was appointed the first President of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery. Pelham wrote to Davis offering his services to the new government and asked the Confederate President, also a West Point graduate, for his opinion as to whether Pelham should resign from West Point immediately or wait until after graduation in June. Pelham did not receive a response.

Things on the national stage quickly began to heat up. On April 12, 1861 Southern forces fired upon Fort Sumter, South Carolina and the Civil War formally began. The next day, U.S. Secretary of War Simon Stanton directed that all West Point cadets must reaffirm their oath of allegiance to the United States of America. Pelham refused, and so did his Texan friend Thomas Rosser. On April 15 President Lincoln issued a public declaration that an insurrection existed and called for 75,000 militia to stop the rebellion. As a result of this call for volunteers, four additional southern states (including Virginia) seceded from the Union.

On April 22, Pelham and Rosser resigned from the U.S. Military Academy just two weeks short of graduation, left West Point, and headed south together via a circuitous route to avoid possible arrest. Pelham and Rosser eventually made their way to Pelham’s home in Calhoun County, where they drilled new volunteers near Jacksonville and then went to the Confederate capital at Montgomery to offer their services. Although Pelham desired a commission in the cavalry, the new government needed artillery officers and assigned him as a lieutenant to oversee arms and ammunition at Lynchburg, Virginia. General Joseph E. Johnston then called for him to come to Harpers Ferry, in what was then Virginia, to turn the new recruits into artillerymen.

Then on the fateful day of July 21, 1861 the First Battle of First Manassas (or Bull Run), was fought near Manassas, Virginia. The Union Army under General Irwin McDowell initially succeeded in driving back Confederate forces under General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard, but the arrival of additional Confederate troops by railroad under General Johnston initiated a series of reversals that sent McDowell’s army in a panicked, disorderly retreat to nearby Washington, D.C. It is here that Thomas Jonathan Jackson, a professor at VMI, would receive everlasting fame as “Stonewall” Jackson. One of his artillery units, holding his flank, was led by Lieutenant John Pelham, who was hailed as a young hero of the battle pivotal to the Southern victory. Pelham would go on to further fame, particularly in the Battle of Fredericksburg, and is still cited today for his innovative use of mobile artillery that vexed opposing forces.

After a string of brilliant successes on the battlefield after the First Battle of Manassas, many expected that Pelham would return to his home in Calhoun County at the end of the war and play a big role on local and Alabama history. Fate may have even allowed him to lend a hand in the future founding of Anniston—but fate was not on his side. On March 17, 1863, Union forces attacked Confederate troops to clear them from the upper Rappahannock River in Virginia in preparation for Union general Joseph Hooker’s advance toward what became known as the Battle of Kelly’s Ford. At the time, Pelham was in nearby Culpepper, where he had come by train. When notified of the attack, he borrowed a horse and rode to Kelly’s Ford, a crossing on the Rappahannock. He had barely entered the fight when an exploding shell embedded a fragment in the back of his head and penetrated the lower part of his brain. He died in the early hours of the next morning at the young age of 24. Confederate leaders considered Pelham irreplaceable, and his death coincided with the decline of Confederate cavalry dominance, precipitating a complete turn in the tide of the entire war. Pelham’s body was returned to Calhoun County, and he was buried in the City Cemetery in Jacksonville on March 31, 1863.
On the opposite side of the First Battle of Manassas, taking fire from Pelham’s artillery on July 21, 1861, were some faces familiar to history. One was a then-Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, who settled into a period of depression and pessimism after the battle and had to take an extended period of leave before eventually returning, being promoted to the general ranks, and achieving fame (or infamy to some) in the war. However, it was another Union leader taking fire from Pelham who would ironically play a major role in the future of Calhoun County, and it was perhaps the most unlikely participant in the First Battle of Manassas.

Daniel Tyler, one of the first Union Army generals of the Civil War, was 62 years old on July 21, 1861. Originally from Connecticut, Tyler (like Pelham) had also attended West Point, but had left the Army in 1834 and entered the iron manufacturing business. However, when the Civil War broke out he volunteered for Army service again for the North and was soon appointed a brigadier general in the Connecticut Militia. At the First Battle of Manassas, he commanded a division in General Irvin McDowell’s Army of Northeastern Virginia, on the opposite side of the fighting from the young John Pelham.
Unlike Pelham, who was hailed for his brilliant performance on July 21, 1861, military historians have not been kind to Tyler, and he has been assigned a substantial portion of the blame for the Union disaster at Manassas. For that and other reasons, he was mustered out of the Union Army on August 11, 1861, though he would eventually return as the Union desperately looked for experienced leaders. Fate—particularly the fate of Anniston, however—would be much kinder to General Tyler. He finally resigned his commission in the Union Army on April 6, 1864, upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65 and moved to New Jersey. Then, in the 1870s, he moved to Alabama and co-founded the town of Anniston, named for his daughter-in-law, where he established an iron manufacturing company and was president of the Mobile and Montgomery Railroad. Though he died while visiting New York City in 1882, he was buried in Hillside Cemetery, at Anniston, Alabama.

To this day, the graves of Pelham and Tyler lie just a few miles apart in Calhoun County. Though quite a few local citizens know their names, many are not aware that they fought fiercely against each other on July 21, 1861, with Pelham hailed as a brilliant tactician and Tyler criticized for his leadership failures on the battlefield. Destiny, however, would deem that only one would eventually spend his final days alive in Calhoun County, and in a great irony in history, it would be the very old, losing Union military officer and not the young Confederate officer from Calhoun County itself who would lend his legacy to the founding of Anniston.

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Rear Admiral Kent Davis, U.S. Navy (Retired), formerly served as City Manager of Anniston. He currently serves as Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs, headquartered in Montgomery.

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