Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

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...

R ecently while walking at Secor Metropark west of Toledo, my wife and I visited Wolfinger Cemetery which is inside the park boundaries. While walking through, we discovered a gravestone for Private Eliakim Munson of Co. F, 14 th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Intriguingly, it stated that he was killed in action September 19, 1863, during the Battle of Chickamauga. The 14 th Ohio suffered 245 casualties out of 460 engaged during Chickamauga including 35 killed. That said, it is unusual to find a gravestone in the North for a Federal soldier who was killed at Chickamauga. As the Army of the Cumberland was defeated during this fight, the dead were (by and large) left behind on the battlefield. So, was this stone a cenotaph erected by his family, or was Private Munson actually buried in Wolfinger Cemetery? Gravestone of Private Eliakim Munson of Co. F, 14th Ohio Volunteer Infantry at Wolfinger Cemetery in northwestern Lucas Co., Ohio Before answering that, let’s dig a little more into wha...

T his gritty account of the charge on December 29, 1862, at Chickasaw Bayou, was penned by an unknown soldier in the 13 th Illinois.  The 13 th Illinois was part of Brigadier General Frank P. Blair’s brigade, holding the right front of the brigade when they conducted their charge. The regiment lost 27 killed, 107 wounded, and 40 prisoners in the fight along with their colors. Sergeant Jesse Pierce of Co. H carried them into action and was knocked out by the concussion of a shell. He came to when the Confederates, believing him to be dead, rolled him over to liberate the flag “which they valued more than they did the sergeant,” the regimental historians of the 13 th noted.           The letter appeared in the May 1, 1863, edition of the Mercersburg Journal , published right about the time that General Grant launched his ultimately successful campaign to take Vicksburg.

N ear high noon on December 31, 1862, General William S. Rosecrans saw that a sacrifice needed to be made to buy time to reform the collapsing Federal army at the Battle of Stones River. He turned to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. Shepherd commanding the Regular Brigade.           An officer of the 18 th U.S. Infantry was within earshot of Rosey’s conversation with Colonel Shepherd. “The enemy had succeeded in massing his forces at our weak point and that a change of front of our own forces was necessary for the salvation of the entire army,” he wrote. “My first knowledge of this fact was derived from hearing the fact stated in an undertone by General Rosecrans to [Lt. Col. Oliver L.] Shepherd who happened to be within eight or ten feet from me at the time. [Rosecrans] stated that he had ordered two brigades of Rousseau’s division forward to hold the enemy in check as long as possible. But that unless we could hold them for 30 minutes withou...