Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

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...

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...