Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

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...

A s part of General Silas Casey's division of the IV Corps, the 85th New York took part in the opening actions of the Battle of Seven Pines on May 31, 1862. Corporal Ellicott R. Stillman of that regiment provides an eyewitness view to the hard fighting his division made that afternoon which was included in Wilbur Hinman’s Camp and Field: Sketches of Army Life Written by Those Who Followed the Flag, ’61-’65 published in 1892.

T he combat at Gaines Mill was reaching a crescendo on the evening of June 27, 1862, when Lieutenant James L. Wray received two disabling wounds which would end his wartime service with the 10 th Pennsylvania Reserves. The senior lieutenant leading his company had fallen leaving Way in command of Co. E “I sprang before the company and urged them to follow me and I think it was not a minute until a Rebel officer called at me to halt and fired at me with his revolver, hitting me in the left wrist. I had my Colt in my hand, leveled it at his breast and fired. He threw both hands over his head and fell to the ground, dead. Our lines were now not more than 15 paces apart and I was getting faint from the loss of blood and when we were ordered to charge bayonets, I was hit with a Minie ball in the left hip which sent me reeling round in a circle. Then I fell to the ground and was carried from the field in a blanket.” Lieutenant Wray’s account of the fighting at Mechanicsville and Gaines ...

C ompany F of the 77 th Pennsylvania had the unfortunate honor of being on the picket line tasked with defending the Federal right in the opening moments of the Battle of Stones River. The company, on the far left of General Kirk’s picket line, scarcely had time to fire three volleys before the onrushing Arkansans of Colonel Evander McNair’s brigade forced them to retreat.           After the battle, three enlisted men of Co. F wrote letters home to their families providing their perspectives on what they witnessed that morning. Included in their letters are accounts of McNair’s assault, the 77 th Pennsylvania counterattack on Douglas’s Texas Battery, and even a rare sighting of General Richard W. Johnson who ordered the men of the 77 th to “take a tree and die there or be taken prisoner.”           As I read the following accounts, I can imagine myself sitting around a campfire in Murfreesb...

A dvancing against Marye’s Heights on the afternoon of December 13, 1862, Private J. Archibald McCullough of the 126 th Pennsylvania recalled the moment General Humphreys ordered his regiment to charge the Confederate line. “We were formed in line of battle, as we supposed, to support our battery which was planted and doing good execution on the hill in front,” McCullough wrote. “Soon, however, old General Humphreys rode up to General Tyler, ordering him to charge the works in front and in the meantime an aide from General [Daniel] Butterfield came to General Humphreys saying the works should be carried at all hazards. General Humphreys took off his old hat and waving it said, “I’ll take it sir, without fail.” “We were immediately ordered to fix bayonets, then came the sound of “attention” from the bugle, the sound which we so much dislike to hear when tired and halted on a march. Soon, this was followed by the call of “forward” when old Humphrey as we call him rode to the front c...