Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

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...

I n May of 1862, General Stonewall Jackson's Valley army pushed the Federal forces under General Nathaniel Banks out of the Shenandoah Valley. It was a discouraging defeat that set off something of a panic in Washington, but Captain Andrew Clark of the 3rd Wisconsin felt certain that the troops were not to blame.        " There was something wrong somewhere in withdrawing so many troops from General Banks and leaving him with so small a force so far in the enemy’s country," Captain Clark wrote. "We were three months driving the Rebels from the valley and have lost all we gained and considerably more in three days, which makes it rather discouraging for us who have worked night and day. But we have one consolation: we have done our duty and cannot be blamed for the disaster."           Captain Clark’s missive describing the First Battle of Winchester and the subsequent retreat of General Banks army from the Shenandoa...

L ooking back on the Battle of Chickamauga, Lieutenant Colonel Ole Johnson of the 15th Wisconsin lamented to his brother that " there was great mismanagement somewhere during this battle is evident to everyone but to point where the blame rests may not be quite so easy. On Saturday, our brigade was hurried into the fight entirely unsupported on either flank and the result was that after desperate fighting and heavy losses we were driven back and then another brigade would be sent in in the same manner, and thus we were defeated in detail."      Continuing his story of what happened to his regiment on September 19th, he wrote, "W hen the 25 th   Illinois had passed to the rear, we became immediately engaged with the enemy and the line in our rear (after the 25 th   Illinois passed over them and probably thinking that they were the last of the our troops in front of them) immediately opened fire and we were thus placed between the fires of friends and foes, suffer...

F ollowing the publication of General Lew Wallace's article about Fort Donelson in Century Magazine , Morton M. Casseday, the son of deceased Confederate officer Alexander Casseday who had served as assistant inspector general on General Simon B. Buckner's staff, shared the following private letters from his father giving his perspective of that historic engagement.      Morton wrote as an introduction, "Among the earlier war papers of the Century Magazine was one from General [Lew] Wallace, describing the battle of Fort Donelson. It was then that it occurred to me that the contemporary letters of my father, Major Alex Casseday, who was an officer of General S.B. Buckner’s staff [assistant inspector general], could at least furnish an interesting account of the policy and conduct of one of the Confederate leaders in that memorable contest. Major Casseday was familiar with the proceedings of the councils of the general officers at Donelson and led the 14 th Mississippi w...

M icah C. Saufley, a Confederate veteran who served in the 6 th Kentucky Cavalry and rode with John Morgan, wrote the following letter to his daughter on Christmas day, 1906 giving his reminiscences of Morgan’s raid through Indiana and Ohio and his capture shortly after Buffington Island. It was shared at a United Daughters of the Confederacy meeting in Knoxville on January 16, 1907, and subsequently published in the Knoxville Sentinel .

In the late 1890s, the survivors of the 16 th Michigan endeavored to recover a set of regimental colors that the regiment had lost in battle more than 30 years prior during the Battle of Gaines Mill, Va. The effort resulted in a number of articles published in both Confederate Veteran and local newspapers which provided both Blue and Gray perspectives of how the colors were captured on the evening of June 27, 1862.