Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
My wife and I recently spent an afternoon in Holly Springs, Mississippi. This quaint little Southern town just drips history. There is a local museum that is full to bursting with cool local trivia.
There was a ghastly yellow fever epidemic in Holly Springs in 1878 that killed 2,000 people, a substantial percentage of the town’s population. An old church downtown has been converted into a yellow fever museum. It was closed the day we were there, but I looked through the window. Human skeletons were sitting in the pews. I hate to have missed that.
Table of contents
One handwritten exhibit claimed that the 8th son of some German king moved to Holly Springs and started a company making thunder jugs, earthen crockery used to carry moonshine. That sounds intriguing. If Google has any insights you’ll likely read about that eventually. And then there was a single framed sheet of paper devoted to Confederate Major General Earl Van Dorn.
Van Dorn has been described by military historians as one of the greatest cavalry commanders who ever lived. Considering his competition includes such illustrious personalities as JEB Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and George Patton, that is high praise indeed. Van Dorn brilliantly destroyed one of US Grant’s supply dumps in Holly Springs back during the American Civil War. However, that’s not what caught my eye. What I found fascinating were the sordid circumstances surrounding his untimely death in 1863 at age 42 at the hands of a spurned husband.
Van Dorn’s Origin Story
Earl Van Dorn entered the world in 1820, one of nine kids born to Sophia Donelson Caffery and Peter Van Dorn in Port Gibson, MS. He attended the US Military Academy in 1838, graduating four years later with a class ranking of 52d out of 63. His poor performance turned on a lamentable tendency toward profanity, a slovenly attitude toward military courtesy, and a tobacco addiction, the devil’s weed. Van Dorn’s inability to manage his most basic instincts would come back to haunt him later.
Soon after graduation, Van Dorn married Caroline Godbold, the daughter of a respected Alabama plantation owner. Together they had two kids. From 1842 until the onset of the American Civil War, Earl Van Dorn excelled in a variety of military postings. He refined his craft by fighting both Mexicans and Comanches. Along the way, he developed a reputation as a gifted combat leader, particularly while commanding fast-moving mounted forces.
A Timeless Temptation
I don’t know where you stand on the Prince of Darkness and his time-tested temptation techniques. Even if, like me, you don’t care much for the guy as an institution, you have to admire his work. Satan is exceptional at what he does.
Tradition holds that King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, wrote the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. Within those pages, this exceptionally clever man claimed that there was nothing new under the sun. As it relates to our discussion today, this simply means that Satan has no particular impetus to get creative. The same temptations that got King David 3,000 years ago are comparably effective on us today.
It was one particularly potent tool that old Lucifer unleashed on Earl Van Dorn. When temptation came a-knocking, Earl jumped right in. This particular example was soft, curvy, and married.
The Curse of Earl Van Dorn
God knew that I could not be trusted with striking good looks or a compelling physique. Had I been six foot two, 225 pounds, and gifted with a chin that would split rocks and melt hearts, I would have been intolerable. As it is, the capacity to make words was a consolation prize of sorts. Lamentably, the ability to turn a pithy phrase does not necessarily equate to meteoric high school popularity. Earl Van Dorn, by contrast, was indeed quite the lady killer.
Surviving photographs are all obviously fairly crude. They demonstrate a thin intense man sporting a generous yet unruly shock of hair and ample whiskers. Period commentators described Van Dorn as having a blonde coif, piercing blue eyes, and an exceptionally compelling demeanor. In addition, his service as a young officer in the Army involved a great deal of time away from his family. Combine this with some not-insubstantial notoriety arising from his rarefied martial exploits, and you have the recipe for some fairly epic infidelity.
Van Dorn was a socially adroit player who found himself the center of attention at events both public and private. His refined air and engaging wit drew women like iron filings to a magnet. For his part, Van Dorn did little to discourage this. No less a source than the New York Times wrote, “It’s true that Van Dorn was enormously attractive to many women — one memoirist wrote that ‘his bearing attracted, his address delighted, his accomplishments made women worship him.’” I can only imagine how chilly things got on his infrequent visits back home if Mrs. Van Dorn happened to see what the New York Press was writing about her philandering husband.
Van Dorn Joins The War Effort
With the onset of hostilities, Earl Van Dorn threw his hat in with the Confederacy. In January of 1861 he was appointed a Brigadier General in the Mississippi Militia. A month later he assumed command of the entirety of Mississippi’s state forces, replacing Jefferson Davis who had recently been elected president of the Confederacy. By March of that year, Van Dorn had resigned from the militia to take a posting with the Regular Army of the CSA (Confederate States of America). In this capacity he headed west to Texas to neutralize any Federal forces posted there refusing to side with the Rebels.
Upon his arrival in Galveston, Texas, Van Dorn and his troops seized three U.S. warships held at anchor in the harbor. This was the first formal surrender of fighting troops of the war. When word of this audacious action reached Washington, DC, President Lincoln formally branded Van Dorn a pirate. However, these were difficult times for Lincoln and the Union. Such labels carried little weight on the frontier. For his part, Earl Van Dorn just tore about wreaking mayhem.
Details
Van Dorn had a gift for cavalry but struggled to manage conventional massed infantry. During the Battle of Pea Ridge In Missouri and the subsequent sweeping fights at Corinth and Shiloh, Van Dorn stood watch over two strategic defeats. During his retreat from Shiloh, Van Dorn and his troops moved right past where I sit typing these words. His fighting withdrawal took him through such Mississippi communities as Abbeville, Oxford, Water Valley, Grenada, and the aforementioned Holly Springs.
While Van Dorn’s performance as a divisional commander had been marked by failure, his gifts as a cavalryman were nonetheless still well respected. As a result, he was granted a substantial mounted command which he wielded brilliantly. During the 1862 Holly Springs Raid, Van Dorn led an audacious cavalry attack that destroyed US Grant’s supply dumps, setting back the critical Vicksburg Campaign substantially. Van Dorn’s slashing raids alongside similar performances by the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest also precluded Grant from executing his controversial General Order No 11.
Forrest went on to help found the Ku Klux Klan, so there’s that. However, lest you think the Confederacy had a corner on the bigotry market, Grant’s General Order No. 11 mandated the forcible expulsion of all Jews from his military district. US Grant was convinced that the Jews were behind the widespread military corruption in his ranks and the illicit trade in Southern cotton. It seems institutional antisemitism is indeed a timeless scourge.
The Beginning of the End For Earl Van Dorn
MG Van Dorn subsequently enjoyed great success as a cavalry officer. Nathan Bedford Forrest was his most gifted subordinate. After the First Battle of Franklin in Williamson County, Tennessee, in April of 1863, Van Dorn’s troops were bloodied but successful. In the aftermath, the budding Klansman Bedford Forrest made statements critical of his superior’s generalship. Enraged, Van Dorn challenged Forrest to a duel. However, Forrest talked his boss out of this course of action on patriotic grounds.
READ MORE: Chris Dorner: Gun Control Preaching Psychopath from Beyond the Grave
All this drama was no doubt pretty stressful, and Earl Van Dorn was a card-carrying player. Like powerful men both before and after, he sought an outlet. While making his headquarters in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Van Dorn became acquainted with Mrs. Jessie Helen Kissack Peters. This comely lass was the fourth wife of local physician and state legislator George Peters. Dr. Peters was fully 25 years older than his attractive young bride, and his frequent trips away on government business left her bored and unsupervised. Earl Van Dorn was more than happy to keep the hot young woman company in her husband’s absence.
Then as now, small Southern towns do an abysmal job at keeping secrets. Van Dorn’s frequent visits to the Peters estate and subsequent unchaperoned carriage rides with Mrs. Peters set the locals all atwitter. When Dr. Peters returned in April of 1863, he found the entire town mocking him as a cuckold. Peters surreptitiously arrived to find Van Dorn and his wife in an awkwardly snuggly state. After some desperate pleading, Peters let Van Dorn leave once he promised to draft an open letter to the town admitting to the indiscretion.
The Deed
The letter was not forthcoming, and Dr. Peters was none too keen to let this injustice go unanswered. On 7 May, Peters made an excuse to visit Van Dorn at his headquarters. There he found the general seated at his desk writing. The offended physician slipped up behind the man and shot him in the back of the head with a small-caliber pistol. The ball pithed Van Dorn’s brain and lodged inside his forehead. The philandering cavalryman died some four hours later never having regained consciousness.
The legal system in the CSA was not quite refined. Everyone who mattered knew that Van Dorn had been doing the nasty with Dr. Peters’ wife. Peters, for his part, announced that Van Dorn had “violated the sanctity of his home” and was never charged. The display in the Holly Springs museum claimed that Dr. Peters was a Union spy, but I can find no credible evidence of that allegation today. I think he was likely just a run-of-the-mill jilted husband.
Jessie was found to be pregnant around the time of Van Dorn’s death, and local tongues wagged. Jessie and George Peters subsequently divorced, something that was vanishingly rare back then, though they eventually reconciled. Jessie attended Peters in his old age until his death. However, I rather suspect that conversations between Dr. Peters and his wandering wife Jessie were nonetheless fairly spirited.
*** Buy and Sell on GunsAmerica! All Local Sales are FREE! ***
Fascinating story! Thank you for bringing out this bit of history.
As always Dr. Dabbs never fails to entertain with his unique way of description of subject matter. With his mere mention of the devils wiley ways he leads into territory many even today have tread. Women, whether with forethought or no, have been the bain (along with alcohol) of many a man’s existance whether he be great or common.
Thank you for another interesting history lesson. I missed you the last couple of weeks and I hope you had a wonderful vacation.
Very interesting content.
History is something that we should never forget, nor ignore
Thanks again for these brief excursives into the history of our American Civil War.
Welcome back, Will! I’ve missed your historical musings during all the hoopla surrounding the SHOT show. The point has been made multiple times that on a per capita basis, the Confederacy enjoyed a statistically significant advantage of gifted commanders and soldiers. This is most often attributed to the rural and agricultural nature of the Southern States. Had the Confederacy possessed a similar industrial capacity to the Union, we may well be discussing a vasty different history of the last 160 years.
Disappointed you did injustice to the name of General Forrest. His role and the role of the Klan should be explained, including his denouncement when it became solely a tool of racism.
Another great story by Dr. Dabbs. I can’t wait for the next one. Thanks again. Doctor.
I was told that Phil Sheridan wanted to engrave upon one of the buildings at West Point. The saying that a “Soldier that would not fuck would not fight eiither”.
One of Von Dorn’s subordinates during the battle of Pea Ridge was a Brigadier General Albert Pike. The Pike bloodline has long been in America dating back as far as the colonial period. Albert was of Jewish descent, a prolific writer and poet, a lawyer, an expert on Mason rituals, likely Illuminati member, an overt racist, supporter of the KKK an occultist and many other things. During the battle of Pea Ridge, Pike was in command of several Indian tribes that were slave owning Confederate units (yes Indians owned slaves, slavery was far more complicated then what is taught today). Pike’s troops were accused of scalping Union troops, Von Dorn claimed that Pike failed to properly support his offensive.
After the battle Pike was charged by Major General Thomas Carmichael Hindman Jr. of treason and subordiation. Pike resigned from the his commision in the CSA and fled to the hills of Arkansas but was later arrested. Hindman was assasinated shortly after the war. Both of Pike’s most dangerous Confederate rivals were eliminated by an assassin and Pike never faced any charges by either the Confederacy or the Union. No small fortune had fallen into lap.
The most bizzare aspect of Pike’s history are his supposed predictions of the three future world wars that he discussed in his letters to fellow Mason Giuseppe Mazzni, Pike was exceptionally intelligent and the predictions are disturbing and worth reading. For years conservative Linden Larusch called for the removal of Pike’s statue in the nation’s capital but only when Demsheviks rioted did that finally occur.
My mistake, Van (Dutch) not Von (German).
“Grant’s General Order No. 11 mandated the forcible expulsion of all Jews from his military district. US Grant was convinced that the Jews were behind the widespread military corruption in his ranks and the illicit trade in Southern cotton. It seems institutional antisemitism is indeed a timeless scourge.”
It seems that there are only two choices, the first choice is that one believes that Jews are innocent victims that suffer at the hands of every other other guilty race of mankind throughout history. Thus “antisemitism” is a mysterious phenomena that has no basis in the nature and conduct of Jews themselves.
A second choice is that the various races and cultures of mankind, over thousands of years, react in extremely negative fashion to the nature and conduct of Jews themselves. Many great historical figures are accused of being “antisemitic” including Shakespeare, Voltaire, George Patton, Charles Dickens, T. S. Elliot, Harry Truman, Benjamin Butler, Heny Ford, Ezra Pound et cetera.
Still, which ever one of these two vastly differant view points one subscribes too, it still ends with a racist explanation. The first choice of course has a well known word which is “antisemitism.” The second choice is a racism that faults the “Gentiles,” but there is no special word for this type of racism.
Mark Twain wrote an essay that might touch on a third choice
Concerning the Jews
The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek
and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned
out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no
infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew;
all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? -Mark Twain
Saying they are G-ds children would explain a lot. Anti semitism being the default setting ie “my tribes better than your tribe” and finding it’s not might be another part. Perhaps MLK’s quote about the content of character rather than the color of skin could be extended to cover your religious beliefs as well.