Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

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.

A month after the events of Stones River, Lieutenant David Franklin Embree of the 42 nd Indiana remained haunted by the death of one of his comrades.           In response to a question from his sister about how men feel in battle, Embree related this grisly tale. “The ball came obliquely from the left and front, passing several feet in front of me. It seemed that I could hear it singing almost from the time it left its bed in the Rebel’s gun. As it came swiftly I knew where it was going by the sound. Suddenly, I heard the same ball go crash against something and I knew by the sound that it had burst a human skull,” he wrote. “I barely had time to look around to my right and then I saw Sergeant Chauncey Glassmith quivering and dying. This happened when we were not very hotly engaged and when our men were not firing else I could not have heard the singing of the bullet. Every one of us could not refrain from casting a glance at the dying...