The Philandering Confederate General Earl Van Dorn: The Harder They Fall…

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.

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.

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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.

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