Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

O n April 11, 1862, Federal forces under the command of Brigadier General Ormsby M. Mitchel captured Huntsville, Alabama in a surprise move upon the vital Memphis & Charleston Railroad. Troopers from the 4 th Ohio Cavalry galloped into town at dawn, quickly seizing the post office and railroad depot. Among the papers of the telegraph office, they discovered a dispatch from General P.G.T. Beauregard dated from two days before at Corinth, Mississippi. Upon receiving this dispatch, General Mitchel’s staff set to work deciphering the document. “It is a simple and easy cipher which required General Mitchel and his aides about 20 minutes to translate,” a reporter from the Cincinnati Gazette noted. But how did they actually crack the code? And why was this seemingly important document sitting on a desk in Huntsville? This article explores those questions. 

C orporal Henry Gage of the 96th Illinois recalled the dramatic moment on the morning of November 25, 1863 as the members of the 8th Kentucky raised their flag atop Lookout Mountain.      "Before daybreak, the brigade started to scale the wall and the 8 th  Kentucky of our brigade swung the first flag over the “spur” and old Whitaker was close behind to swing his hat. Boys yell some when they make a successful charge but that noise that rose from the side of that mountain that time was as artillery to small arms. The shout from our lines to Hooker’s men who crossed to help us and was caught up on the other side of the mountain and so died away in the distance. Now that we had the mountain, our regiment and the 8 th  Kentucky came up to hold it and the rest of the brigade went on. We did not lose many in the scrape," he noted.           The following letter, published in the December 19, 1863, edition of the Waukegan...

I n 1896, Illinois veteran John Wiesman visited Atlanta and wrote of his disappointment at the degradation of the battlefield and the "disgraceful" monument to his fallen army commander General James B. McPherson.      " In walking over the field, I found only one bullet but the natives have quite a stock of relics on hand and are disposing of them at a fair price. I was surprised to find nailed high up to a pine tree where General McPherson fell, a sign reading “Gen. John B. McPherson, killed July 22, ’64.” How or by whom such a blunder was made I cannot understand. One would suppose that anyone who was in the least familiar with the history of the late war and our generals, especially one so prominent as our beloved McPherson, would know it was James B. and not John B.  The monument erected where General McPherson is a disgrace to our government. It is a condemned cannon enclosed by a cast iron rail fence about the size of a hen coop. That is all that marks the sac...

C rippled by a lame foot, Lieutenant Benjamin Blandy of the 25th Ohio missed out of his regiment's fight on Chinn Ridge at Second Bull Run but watched the events unfold from the regimental hospital wagons.     " Our regiment was on the left flank and our brigade was ordered out to support a battery. Nearly all our forces were stationed away on its right. The enemy concentrated his entire force on the left (the weakest point) and hurled them against us like a thunderbolt. They marched up like mad men, not at a charge, but marched up in solid column without firing a shot. As fast as one regiment was mowed down like grass by the scythe, another stepped up in his place. I know that our brigade killed and wounded more than their own number, but the Rebels still advanced with their heads down and took the flag from the color sergeant of the 73 rd  Ohio. At such conduct, our boys became panic-stricken and fled," he wrote.          ...

O n the evening of February 4, 1862, Lieutenant Colonel Jasper Maltby of the 45 th Illinois gathered the commissioned officers of his regiment together to give them a pep talk. After more than two months of service at Camp Washburne, Camp Douglas, and Cairo, there was finally the prospect that the regiment would see action on the morrow. Ten miles south of them lay Fort Henry on the Tennessee River.           “He said that we were about to meet the enemy and he expected that everyone would do his whole duty,” recalled Second Lieutenant Henry H. Boyce of Co. I. “He also said that by placing our trust in the God of battles and our good guns we would surely conquer. We would assist in making the future history of our country and he wanted it to be such a history as our children should not be ashamed to read.”           Duly encouraged, the regiment marched out on February 6 th as they heard the ...

I n the days after the Federal victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, the western armies pushed south along the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, eventually taking over control of much of middle Tennessee. But in eastern Kentucky, Union forces were also on the move and their sights were on Cumberland Gap.           To that end, in early March 1862 General Samuel Carter directed a demonstration made at Big Creek Gap to draw Confederate forces away from Cumberland Gap and assigned the task to his brother, Colonel James Carter leading the 2 nd East Tennessee, along with a portion of the 49 th Indiana. The expedition across the mountains proved a trying affair for the troops as remembered by Lieutenant Colonel James Keigwin of the 49 th Indiana.           “After three days’ hard marching over muddy roads, we arrived at the foot of Little Cumberland Mountain late in the evening. An hour was allowe...