Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2008 - (Page 25) Odell persisted in his line of questioning. “Did it embrace any furniture, such as pianos, lookingglasses, etc?” Banks answered, “No, sir, not a solitary thing in the way of private furniture was authorized to be taken. If it was taken it was stolen. If a soldier was seen with a rocking-chair or a looking-glass it was taken from him and sent back. There was a great deal of property destroyed, and a portion of the town of Alexandria was burned. When the navy began to seize the been but little rain for many months, that a great part of the town was destroyed.” In the 400 pages of the Joint Committee’s printed report, there is only one other reference to the burning of Alexandria, and that was a summary of Banks’s testimony. The fact that Union authorities treated the burning of Alexandria as an afterthought can be verified by searching the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, a 128volume compilation of documents related to every aspect of the Civil War. comprehensive accounts of the campaign from the Confederate perspective. “The Yankees left Alexandria about May [13], after burning two-thirds of the town,” he wrote. “Whether it was their intention to burn the whole place, or only some of the public buildings, warehouses, &c., does not clearly appear. My opinion is they did not intend total destruction. The wind was very high and the fire could not be managed.” It would seem that the official position on the burning of Alexandria, cotton the enemy began to burn it. Below Alexandria nothing was burned, but above Alexandria pretty much all of the cotton was burned. When we returned to Alexandria it was understood that the town would be fired. I did not see any necessity for firing the town. I knew there were a great many Union people there, and I gave instructions to General C.C. Grover to provide a guard for its protection at the time of our leaving it, which he did. But on the morning of our departure, or on the day we left, a fire broke out in the attic of one of the buildings on the levee. I was there at the moment the fire broke out. Some soldiers or refugees had been quartered there, and it was not in human power to prevent their setting their place on fire when they left. The colored engineers and other troops were sent for, to the number of a thousand or more, and they did everything that it was possible to do to extinguish the flames; but everything was so dry, there having Cows ran bellowing through the streets. Chickens flew out from yards and fell in the streets with their feathers scorching on them. A dog with his bushy tail on fire ran howling through, turning to snap at the fire as he ran. Other than the summary of Banks’s testimony, which appeared in the Official Records because he also submitted it to Secretary of War, only one other reference to the incident is noted, and it was from a Confederate officer, Lieutenant Edward Cunningham, who was serving as an aide-de-camp to Lieutenant General E. Kirby Smith. On June 27, 1864, Lieutenant Cunningham wrote his uncle in Lynchburg, Virginia. For some reason, this letter found its way in to the Official Records, possibly because it was one of the few as far as Union authorities were concerned, was that there was a single fire, started by persons unknown, which had burned out of control as a result of a high wind. If the Union authorities essentially ignored the burning of Alexandria, the Confederate authorities did not, and they did not accept the theory that the fire had a single point of origin. In June 1864, Confederate governor of Louisiana, Henry Watkins Allen, appointed seven commissioners to collect testimony concerning the conduct of the Union army during its 1863 and 1864 campaigns in Louisiana. His desire was “to obtain for publication and historical record a careful, accurate statement of the atrocities and barbarities committed by the Federal officers, troops, and camp followers during their late invasion of Western Louisiana.” By April 1865, three of the seven commissioners had submitted their reports, and Governor Allen had them printed in Shreveport. The resulting monograph was one of the last imprints to be published in the Confederacy. Judge Thomas C. Manning was the commissioner for Rapides Parish, and much of the testimony he collected concerned the burning of Alexandria. One of the most objective witnesses who came before him was Jacob Walker, a merchant whose store faced the river Spring 2008/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 25
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