Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

An unidentified Confederate holding a Mississippi rifle at the photographer's studio in Corinth, Mississippi. Mississippi rifles were a common arm of Johnston's army in mid-1863.  A fter serving on the staff of General William J. Hardee as chief ordnance officer for more than a year, in July 1863, Major James M. Kennard reported for duty in his home state of Mississippi (he was a native of Port Gibson), joining the staff of Lieutenant General Joseph E. Johnston as his chief ordnance officer. Writing from Morton, Mississippi on August 17, 1863, he crafted the following report detailing the arms utilized by the troops under Johnston’s command which provides some insights into the remarkable array of weaponry carried by this army at the midpoint of the war. The document, titled “Statement of Arms in Gen. J.E. Johnston’s Command, including those at Demopolis,” resides as page 60 of Major Kennard’s military file hosted by Fold3.   At Demopolis [Alabama] .69 caliber percussi...

B y the end of the Civil War, the 45 th Pennsylvania could point to a war record that marked them as one of the most traveled regiments in the U.S. Army. Organized at Camp Curtin near Harrisburg in October 1861, the regiment was assigned to first to duty on the South Carolina coast, fighting at James Island and Secessionville in June 1862. Transported north to join General John Pope’s Army of Virginia shortly thereafter, the regiment became part of the Army of the Potomac and fought at both South Mountain and Antietam in September and later at Fredericksburg in December.           The following spring, the 9 th Corps was dispatched to the western theater, first to Kentucky, and shortly thereafter to the Mississippi River to support Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg. Our correspondent, a soldier in Co. I labeling himself as “Young America,” picks up the story in mid-June 1863 at Memphis, Tennessee as the Pennsylvanians are about to depart...

.69 caliber "buck and ball" ammunition was the most common type carried by the troops of Hardee's Corps in the summer of 1862, comprising 77% of the long arms carried by the troops of Patton Anderson's Division, and roughly 61% of Wood's division. A s I have been gathering material for an upcoming study of the Kentucky Campaign of 1862, I was delighted to discover the following a pair of reports detailing the arms carried by the troops of General William J. Hardee's corps in the summer of 1862. The first of these reports concerns the arms carried by Brigadier General J. Patton Anderson's division. Assembled by Major James M. Kennard, chief of ordnance on the staff of Major General William J. Hardee, the ‘Consolidated Return of Arms of the 2 nd Division, Left Wing, Army of Mississippi’ details the weapons carried by each of the four brigades of the division. While it does not call out specific arms issues of each regiment (I would love to have that deta...

“I have learned that I am reported killed which has given me a great deal of uneasiness,” reported Captain James Archbald of the 132 nd Pennsylvania to a friend in Scranton after the Battle of Antietam. His regiment, thrust into action for the first time during the fighting near the Sunken Lane, lost heavily and what Archbald saw on the battlefield haunted his dreams that night.           “The adjutant and I lay close together but I could not sleep as I still heard the terrific cannonading or the whizzing of bullets through the corn, so affected was my imagination,” he continued. “In my sleep the battle was partially forgotten as I as so much exhausted. Still, I awoke several times to find I had been dreaming of that fearful struggle.”           Captain Archbald’s description of Antietam first saw publication in the October 4, 1862, edition of the Carbondale Advance .

A nchoring the center of the Union line at the Battle of Seven Pines lay the six guns of Battery A, 1st New York Light Artillery. One of the gunners recalled the destruction his battery caused when they opened on the advancing Confederate battle line with spherical case shot.       " Our spherical case shot are awful missiles, each of them consisting of a clotted mass of 76 musket balls with a heavy charge of powder in the center that is fired by fuse the same as a shell. The missile first acts as a solid shot, ploughing its way through masses of men and then exploding hurls forward a shower of musket balls that mow down the foe in heaps," he wrote.       This gritty and graphic letter, widely reproduced in the Northern press, appears from the June 13, 1862, edition of the Dayton Daily Journal of Ohio. The Journal stated that "the following extract is from a private letter to a gentleman in New York City from his nephew who is a member of Battery ...

Three-star collar insignia of a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army. About one in five of the men who achieved this rank were killed in battle, a casualty rate twice that of brigadiers in the Union army.  It was the summer of 1864. As the Confederate army under General Joseph E. Johnston retreats towards the outskirts of Atlanta, a command scramble ensued when it suspected among the officers of Brigadier General Zachariah Deas’ Alabama brigade that their commander was leaving the service. Deas’ brigade, consisting of the 19 th , 22 nd , 25 th , 39 th , and 50 th Alabama regiments, had seen service with the Army of Tennessee going back to the days before Shiloh. General Deas, who had raised the 22 nd Alabama at the outset of the war and armed it at his personal expense, was wounded at Shiloh and subsequently commissioned brigadier on December 13, 1862. Deas missed Murfreesboro due to illness, but led his brigade through Tullahoma, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and the i...