Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

  Colonel Benjamin Franklin Scribner, commanding the First Brigade of the First Division of the 14 th Army Corps, presented a rightly haggard appearance on the morning of September 21, 1863 when he wrote his friend and business partner Ned Maginness back in New Albany, Indiana. After being awake for four straight nights and fighting both days of the Battle of Chickamauga, the veteran officer’s eyes had nearly swollen shut from hay fever and the bright September sunshine forced him to wear dark spectacles to see. His horse had lost a leg in the fighting and the colonel’s uniform was nicked and pierced from Rebel bullets. “I have again passed through the fiery ordeal with but little damage except the wear and tear. I have been struck four times- a musket ball tore my shoulder a little, I received a slight scrape on the cheek, and was grazed twice on my legs. My little gray horse had one of his legs shot off by a cannon ball and carried me along for some distance before I discovered it

  The liberation of the Unionists of eastern Tennessee was a long-sought-after political goal of the Lincoln Administration through the first two years of the war, and it fell to Major General Ambrose E. Burnside to deliver Knoxville into Union hands in September 1863. The former Army of the Potomac commander, undone by intrigue at the hands of his subordinates and shelved after the twin disasters of Fredericksburg and the Mud March, had been given command of the Army of the Ohio in the summer of 1863 and tasked with liberating eastern Tennessee.           Among the regiments of Burnside’s new army was the 65 th Indiana Volunteer Mounted Infantry. This regiment, raised in southern Indiana, was led by Colonel John Watson Foster of Evansville who had previously seen service at Shiloh with the 25 th Indiana .  The 65 th Indiana had been on guard duty in Kentucky for about eight months when in April 1863 it was mounted upon horses and reorganized as a mounted infantry unit. After elem

  The Chattanooga Daily Rebel was one of the few newspapers in the Confederacy to publish throughout the Civil War. Rousted out of its hometown of Chattanooga in September 1863 by the arrival of General William S. Rosecrans’ army, the newspaper set up shop in Griffin, Georgia and continued to publish until Sherman’s army took Atlanta. It later moved to Selma, Alabama and kept publishing its two-sided single sheet paper until April 1865.           During the Atlanta campaign, the Rebel published daily letters from its correspondents at the front. Today’s post features two letters both giving a Confederate point of view of the assault on Kennesaw Mountain. As both men reported, Rebel casualties in this bloody engagement were negligible compared to what their Yankee opponents suffered. “In my rambles this morning, I went upon the battlefield of the 27 th . The scene was horrible. The Yankee dead lay thick upon our front as leaves in Vallambrosa. Some of them were within ten feet of ou

     William Bakhaus was a mere lad of 17 when he joined the predominantly German ranks of Co. C of the 47th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He started off as a musician but ended up being reduced to the ranks as a private, serving out his three year enlistment and mustering out August 20, 1864. The 47th Ohio saw extensive service in western Virginia before joining General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Tennessee and taking part in the Vicksburg campaign. Bakhaus witnessed firsthand the folly of the first assault on Vicksburg which occurred on May 19, 1863 and was unsparing in his criticism of the generalship displayed on that bloody day.     "Our path was pointed out to us by General Frank P. Blair, then commanding our division, who occupied a very strong position behind a big oak tree and with curses that came near withering the leaves urged us forward and to "go in and give 'em hell," Bakhaus recalled. "Well we went in as directed and later on I will show who i

       Civil War bullets are perhaps the most common item collected from the era; the two armies expended bullets by the millions during the four years’ conflict and spent or deformed bullets of all shapes and sizes have made fascinating and affordable collectibles since the guns went silent in 1865.       I recently acquired a display piece featuring 35 different types of small arms ammunition used during the Civil War, including everything from a small .28 caliber ball up to a .69 caliber three-ring Minie and it triggered some questions: how did the Federal army obtain its small arms ammunition during the war? Where did the lead come from to make the bullets, and where and how was the ammunition manufactured? This post seeks to answer those questions. A typical .58 caliber 3-ring Minie bullet   “Whenever the blasts of war blow in the ears of men who trade in the implements of destruction, they are apt to experience more joy than the true warrior, for then comes the harvest of gain.

      The pain of his mother's passing the previous September was still fresh in the mind of Captain Maschil Manring of the 56th Ohio when he was faced with a similarly painful task: to inform his widowed father that Maschil's brother George had been killed in the battle of Champion Hill, Mississippi on May 16, 1863.       " I overtook the regiment which was encamped two miles ahead at 8 after performing one of the most solemn duties of my life.  The verse which I have often heard him sing comes to my mind frequently: 'If happy in my latest breath, I may but grasp his name.'  It is not unreasonable to suppose that those very words were heard by his sainted mother, brothers, and sisters who have been at rest from all their toils for a long time.  There is scarcely a moment that passes over my head but I think of them, " he wrote on May 18, 1863.     Captain Manring's account of Champion Hill was published in the June 18, 1863 issue of the Gallipolis Journal

       The Army of the Tennessee was in the second week of Grant's campaign to take Vicksburg; it was late Tuesday morning May 12, 1863 and the soldiers of John Logan's First Division of McPherson's 17th Army Corps were exhausted after having marched for three miles in line of battle through the dense, tangled undergrowth of the Mississippi countryside. The men of the 20th Ohio were resting in the shade of the trees along Fourteenmile Creek "grumbling, chaffing, munching hard tack, or making fires to boil coffee in their tin cups" when two cannon shells ripped through the dense foliage, followed by a rising crescendo of noise echoing from the trees as a long line of Butternut-clad Confederates yelled and charged. A withering volley dropped two dozen men before the regiment even got into line; they had been caught unprepared by not having their skirmish line out front, and now they were in for it.     As the two lines closed,  First Lieutenant Henry O. Dwight from

     On the afternoon of July 22, 1864, Private John Henry Puck of Co. G of the 37th Ohio Volunteer Infantry volunteered for what he thought would be a safe assignment. He along a dozen or so of his fellow Germans of the 37th Ohio took positions on the top floor of a brick house adjacent to a railroad cut and began to knock holes in the walls to shoot from. Fighting off a Rebel assault from the confines of the brick house was certainly safer duty than taking their chances behind the breastworks. But things didn't work out quite according to plan as Puck remembered at the 1889 reunion of the regiment in St. Mary's Ohio.

    In the closing days of September 1862, the footsore soldiers of General Don Carlos Buell's Army of Ohio marched into the camps surrounding the city Louisville, Kentucky. After marching several hundred miles from the Tennessee/Alabama border in a sizzling dry late summer drought, the rugged veterans were relieved to have finally gotten ahead of Braxton Bragg and now, safe at their base of supplies, the work of re-equipping and reorganizing the army began.      Discontent with General Buell's leadership had been brewing since early summer, and only worsened as the men marched day after day without coming to grips with the Confederate army. Republican newspapers throughout the North frequently expressed their dissatisfaction  with Buell's strict discipline in protecting the property of Southern secessionists by running letters from soldiers of Buell's army complaining about the ridiculous situations they found themselves in. Buell and his chief subordinates regarded an