Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

First Sergeant John  H. Nichols served in Co. F, of the 16th Tennessee Volunteers during the Civil War and in 1902 left a poignant account of his experiences assaulting the Round Forest at Stones River.  An unidentified Confederate private holding a flintlock musket. The courage of men like these who staged assault after assault against the Round Forest at Stones River was extraordinary.  The 16th Tennessee, known as the First Mountain Regiment, was raised in the eastern portion of the state in May and June of 1861 and was commanded by Seminole and Mexican War veteran Colonel John Houston Savage. Colonel Savage was a colorful character by all accounts and likely deserves a blog post all of his own. Nichols company, Co. F, was raised in Putnam County and was known as "The Highlanders." Putnam County had been organized in the mid-1850s and its particular value to the Confederacy lay in the saltpeter mines which lay within the county boundaries.  Map of middl...

    The most crucial piece of real estate during the first day of the Battle of Stones River was a small patch of woods near the intersection of the Nashville Pike and the railroad about two miles northwest of Murfreesboro. Later named the Round Forest, the area is within the park boundaries of the Stones River National Battlefield and is marked not only by ample signage from the Park Service, but the Hazen Brigade monument, constructed during the war, is located adjacent to the railroad. During the course of the first day of the battle, multiple Union regiments from several brigades fought in and around the Round Forest, fending off five determined assaults by Confederate troops. The ground to the south of the Round Forest lay so heavily carpeted with Confederate dead and wounded that it became known as the Mississippian’s Half-Acre or Hell’s Half-Acre. In the way that the Miller Cornfield and Burnside’s Bridge stand as sacred ground at Antietam, the Round Forest at St...

Part II of Captain John H. James' account of the Stones River campaign covers December 28-31, 1862, including his lengthy account of the role played by the 26th Ohio in defending the Nashville Pike during the crucial afternoon of the 31st of December. Captain John H. James, Co. A, 26th Ohio Volunteer Infantry

John Henry James was born in July 9, 1834 in Champaign Co., Ohio to John Hough James and his wife Abigail. The elder James, a friend of Henry Clay, was a prominent businessman being at one time a railroad president and at another a bank president. John Henry studied at the Kentucky Military Institute before taking up law and entering into practice as an attorney in Urbana at the time of the Civil War. He married Harriet Hall Lynch in 1866 and they had six children: Abbe Bailey James (1864-1936), Margaret Lynch James (1866-1956), Gertrude Vanuxem James (1867-1929), John Hough James (1869-1950), Harriet James (1874-1909), Frances Hepburn James (1877-1943). Captain James died of paralysis September 23, 1898 in Urbana, Ohio. He and his wife Harriet (March 4, 1837-February 11, 1911) are buried at Oak Dale Cemetery in Urbana.   Captain John Henry James, Co. A, 26th Ohio Volunteer Infantry An Urbana attorney turned soldier He enlisted as the Adjutant of the 26th Ohio Volunteer I...

In honor of tomorrow marking the 158th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh, I take pleasure in presenting the following account written by Second Lieutenant John Adams of Co. G, 57th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He wrote this reminiscence many years after the war and it was published in the Findlay Daily Jeffersonian .  Second Lieutenant John Adams, Co. G, 57th Ohio Volunteer Infantry (Robert Van Dorn Collection)

It was a calm, quiet, beautifully sunlit April Sunday at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but Captain James M. Patterson (1832-1917) of Co. K of the 49 th Ohio was soaked to the skin, shaken both by the cold and what he had witnessed since crossing the Tennessee River a week before. The rain began as his regiment waited nervously at Savannah, Tennessee on Sunday night April 6, 1862, a regular “Baptist downpour” it was called; a tremendous thunderstorm punctuated by the dull heavy roar of the Union gunboats as they dropped shells towards the Confederate lines all night long. “It rained nearly all night. In fact, the elements have been so disturbed that it rained nearly all the time until today,” he wrote on Sunday April 13, 1862. “We never got our tents until last night but we are now fixed and I can now write. I have seen the elephant, I have stood upon the bloody field of Shiloh amidst the showers of grape and shell.”   A period print showing the 1st Ohio of Rousseau's Brigade...

Two days before the battle of Shiloh, two companies of the 72 nd Ohio became involved in a fracas with 400 Alabama cavalry south of the drill field near Shiloh Church. The regiment was conducting battalion drill under the guidance of Major Leroy Crockett around 2 in the afternoon on Friday, April 4, 1862 when the sounds of musketry were heard to the south. Fearing an attack upon the Federal picket line, Major Crockett, at Colonel Ralph Buckland’s order, led two companies (B and H) and deployed them in a skirmish line to find the Confederates. Crockett took command of Co. H on the right and led them into the thickets while Captain George Raymond took his company (B) off to the left. The two companies were soon out of sight of one another and a mile and a half south of the picket line, Co. B ran into a hornet’s nest of cavalry. The men conducted themselves well in their first engagement with the enemy. Private Chester A. Buckland Co. B, 72nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Died of wou...