Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

A fter spending a frigid winter in the mountains of western Virginia, the 32nd Ohio along with the army under the command of General Robert Milroy moved east towards the Shenandoah Valley and ended up clashing with Stonewall Jackson's forces at the Battle of McDowell on May 8, 1862. Sergeant Major Cyrus A. Stevens of the regiment recorded his impressions of that engagement in the following letter which  first appeared in the May 24, 1862, edition of the Zanesville Daily Courier .

T he Battle of Hartsville, Tennessee, fought December 7, 1862, proved an embarrassing defeat of General Rosecrans in the days leading up to the Stones River campaign. Among the participants in this engagement was Second Lieutenant Edward H. Green of Co. E of the 11 th Kentucky Cavalry. The cavalry did not play a prominent role in the battle but Green tried to rally the faltering 108 th Ohio Infantry before the command surrendered. Green numbered among the lucky ones who escaped from Hartsville but that action led to rumblings of cowardice that made their way into the press. The following lengthy account of Hartsville is essentially a defense of Green’s actions during the engagement. He must have been convincing as General Joseph Reynolds placed Green in charge of his escort shortly after Hartsville.           Lieutenant Green’s letter was featured on the first page of the February 5, 1863, edition of the Aurora Journal in which they sa...

L ooking back on the Battle of Camden, North Carolina, Captain J. Merrill Linn of the 51st Pennsylvania remembered the entire expedition that led to the engagement as a "week filled with anxiety, labor, danger, and death." The regiment had been marching for hours when suddenly a Confederate cannon opened fire on their column.       "Bang goes a cannon and a 6-lb round ball struck about 50 yards to the left of the road we were on and went bounding and rolling past," he wrote. "We halted. Then came another which struck in the midst of us in the road but hit no one. We were ordered to get over into the field to the right which we did and the regiment entered a wood. Meantime, one of our pieces was unlimbered and answered. The Rebels kept our range and followed is with round shot, shell, and canister. We turned to the left to get on their flank. We were ready to drop from exhaustion and many laid down as if they were dead."  Captain J. Merrill Linn's lette...

O n December 20, 1862, General Earl Van Dorn’s command surprised the Union garrison at Holly Springs, Mississippi and quickly seized this important depot of General U.S. Grant’s army. After rounding up the prisoners, the Confederates ransacked the town, liberating enough Yankee whiskey to get many of them “gloriously drunk.”           One drunken officer ordered a building set fire where the Federals had stored their ammunition. “The flames speedily communicated to the adjacent buildings and to add to the confusion, the magazine blew up sending the burning fragments into all parts of the city. I was standing on the pavement some hundred yards off when the explosion took place. The concussion was so great even at that distance, I was thrown from my feet and every door in the almost was thrown from the hinges. Windows, sash and all were shattered into fragments of pieces of timber weighing a hundred pounds were found four squares from the sce...

O n the night of February 14, 1862, Orderly Sergeant George Hull of the 13 th Missouri was getting ready to sleep beside his company fire when a captain from the 2 nd Iowa came into camp and made a “most touching appeal to us to aid him in the rescue of some of his wounded men, lying immediately under the enemy’s guns. I called for a dozen volunteers and our boys, although nearly used up by four days of hard work, promptly responded to the call.” “It was a moonlit night and we could see the enemy’s pickets whilst almost half a mile off. We passed up the steep hill on which the 2 nd Iowa had charged up to and over the enemy’s breastworks right into their midst. The hillside was covered with their dead and oh, how ghastly their pale faces looked as the moon shown upon them, but poor fellows, they were all dead. Those who were not able to crawl off had all bled to death. The scene I witnessed that night beneath the enemy’s entrenchments in the dim moonlight was awful. God grant I may...

G oing into action near Shiloh Church on the morning of April 6, 1862, Orderly Sergeant William McClanahan of the 17 th Illinois reveled that “we were now brought face to face with a foe more worthy of our steel than we had ever yet met. Now came the terrible storm of leaden rain but still we stood our ground. Here fell Frederick Thume and Ferdinand Olert of our company; a strange coincidence as they were the only Germans and the only old soldiers in the company yet they were the only ones in the company killed during the whole engagement.” The regiment would go on to fight at seven positions throughout the day, eventually retreating back to within a mile of Pittsburg Landing.           During the Battle of Shiloh, the 17 th Illinois was in the Third Brigade, First Division of the Army of the Tennessee. The regiment served alongside the 29 th Illinois, 43 rd Illinois, and 49 th Illinois , all four regiments under the command of Colonel...