Many readers rapped our knuckles for a serious gaffe we committed in the August, 1975, issue, where we said that the Battle of Eutaw Springs was fought in North Carolina. It took place, of course, in South Carolina. The most eloquent rebuke came from Sam P. Manning, who, as a South Carolina state representative, was chiefly responsible for having Cowpens—the site of Daniel Morgan’s setpiece victory over “Butcher” Tarleton—named a national historic site. He is now working for similar recognition for Eutaw Springs. After correcting us on our mix-up about the state, Representative Manning went on to say that he thought our illustration, which showed the Americans drinking and looting toward the end of the fight, did them a grave disservice:
The picture is unfair to the brave men who fought and died at Eutaw Springs. It does not convey in any sense the valor, the courage, or the sacrifices of the men who fought in this battle, which was probably the hardest-fought of the Revolution. If General Greene had lost at Eutaw Springs, it is doubtful that General Washington would have risked victory or defeat at Yorktown. It is interesting to note that John Adams wrote that the significance of Eutaw Springs was of equal importance to Yorktown.
The Continental Congress awarded a gold medal to Greene in honor of Eutaw Springs. It was one of six gold medals struck in Paris under the supervision of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin during 1785-6 to honor significant actions of the recent war. The largest medal was given to Washington for the retreat of the British from Boston; the second largest went to Greene for Eutaw Springs. The presentation of this medal to Greene is one of the eight scenes from history on the bronze doors of the United States House of Representatives.
At Eutaw Springs both the Continental soldiers and the militia served with great gallantry. Soldiers from at least eleven of the thirteen states fought in the battle. (Among them was Greene’s orderly, a free black man from Maryland, who gave his life and was cited for bravery by Greene.) Over forty counties in twenty-one states are named in honor of the heroes of Eutaw Springs.
Your painting exaggerates in caricature one scene at the end of the battle but leaves out its meaning. Other paintings that AMERICAN HERITAGE has produced for other battles of less importance portray valor and patriotism; Eutaw Springs, one of the great battles of the war, deserves no less.
ANNA AND EMILIE
The turn-of-the-century picture below was just discovered and passed on to us by the New Jersey Historical Society. It shows Anna Lindner, whose water colors ran in the last issue. She is sitting in front of her Bayonne home with her niece, Emilie, whose early years Anna chronicled with painstaking devotion in scores of paintings.
LUSITANIA VICTIMS
In the introduction to Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle’s account of her rescue from the Lusitania (April, 1975) we said that nothing was known about Mme. Depage and Mrs. Naish. That this is not the case has been called to our attention by a dozen readers, among them Mrs. George D. Rowe of Baltimore, who writes:
I loaned a copy of this issue to a friend, Miss F. May Cooper, who went to England in June of 1915 with the American Red Cross and was transferred to a hospital at Lapanne, near Ostend, Belgium, the following year. She tells me that the head of that hospital was M. Depage and that his wife, Mme. Marie Depage, had been lost on the Lusitania while returning from a fund-raising campaign in America. Her body was washed ashore near Queenstown, Ireland. She remembers very well seeing the grave of Mme. Depage in a small plot near the hospital, overlooking the North Sea. It was enclosed by a low white picket fence and decorated with wreaths of flowers made of bright-colored beads.
Mrs. Naish suffered a happier fate, according to the Reverend Charles A. Platt of Ridgewood, New Jersey:
She was Mrs. Theodore Naish, who lived for many years after the tragedy in Kansas City. She was a close friend of my parents, and I recall vividly an evening she spent in our home (when I was nine) during which she told the story of the sinking and her rescue. She was on her honeymoon with her husband. When the first torpedo struck, she and her husband put on life jackets and went immediately to their assigned boat station. She recalled standing there holding her husband’s hand, awaiting the launching of a lifeboat, when there was a second explosion, which sent her crashing into the deck above her head. The next thing she remembered was being pulled from the sea onto an overturned lifeboat. She never saw her husband again.
THE PAST REVEALS ITSELF
In June of 1970, in an article entitled “The Past Springs Out of a Picture,” we ran a photograph (above) identified as “General George Armstrong Custer … with his wife, a maid, and their baby.” We were quickly reminded by our readers that Custer never had a child. What, then, was the baby doing there?
Now, more than five years later, we are astonished to learn that the baby had every reason to be there, for the languid young officer was indeed its father.
Robert M. Utley, the western historian, has finally cleared up the mystery. “The fact is,” writes Utley,
these people are not George and Elizabeth Custer but Albert and Jennie Barnitz. The black maid holds baby Bertha, who was born in this building (the officers’ quarters at Fort Leavenworth) on March 26, 1870, and the Barnitzes left Fort Leavenworth for retirement on June 21, 1870, which establishes the time frame within which this picture was taken. I have a snapshot of these same four people on the same front porch; Barnitz indeed did resemble Custer, in his nose and his head full of curly blond hair. Note, too, that Barnitz wears the single row of buttons of a captain rather than the double rowthat Custer, as a lieutenant colonel, would have worn.
Barnitz was an energetic officer who served throughout the Civil War with the and Ohio Cavalry. Afterward he obtained a Regular Army commission as captain of G Troop, 7th Cavalry, under his famous look-alike. He fought in the Cheyenne Indian wars of 1867-68 and was severely wounded at the Battle of the Washita. Invalided out of the service, he went on to lead a lively civilian life as a public speaker and traveller, and though he finally did die of his wounds, it was not until 1912. Robert Utley is currently editing his diaries and letters.
