Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

     Private Bennett Wood of Co. C of the 4th Texas Infantry was wounded in action three times during his four years of wearing the gray. The first time he was shot in the face at Gaines Mill, the second time through the leg at Gettysburg, and the final time in the foot at the Wilderness. One of his most vivid memories, however, was the Texas Brigade's bitter fight at the Second Battle of Manassas. Wood's account was featured in Reminiscences of the Boys in Gray 1861-65 and is reproduced below just as he wrote it.

       During the Civil War, Corporal John Gordon Law of Co. E of the 154th Senior Tennessee Infantry regiment kept a daily diary of his experiences serving in the ranks of the Army of Tennessee. His entries were well-written and detailed, and perhaps some of his best writing concerns the role his regiment played in the Battle of Richmond, Kentucky.       "The curtain has dropped. The dark and bloody tragedy is closed, and we are in possession of the town of Richmond," he wrote at 7 o'clock the night of August 30, 1862. "Just as the sun was sinking, we drove them from behind the tombstones in the graveyard, pursued their flying columns through the town, and the citizens of Richmond heard the Confederate shout of victory and saw our battle flags waving in triumph over the long gray line that filed through their streets. The 30th day of August will ever be memorable in the history of our country, as marking one of the most brilliant victories ever a...

     Frustration and misery are the two words that best describe the mood of the Federal army in the wake of the defeat at Second Bull Run. "Never in my life have I felt as miserable as on this occasion," Lieutenant Gustav Struve of the 8th New York wrote. "I wished the ground might open under my feet and swallow me forever. With the rest of our regiment I thought the fault was with our Sigel, but soon it became evident that if McDowell was not a traitor, he must be the most miserable coward. He it was who lost the day."     The 56 year old had seen much hardship and misery in his time; born as Gustav von Struve to a Russian diplomat living in Munich, Germany, Gustav attended some of the finest schools in Europe and earned a law degree during the 1820s. By 1833, he had moved to Baden and became active in politics, gaining a reputation for his embrace of radical socialist beliefs. As historian David Dixon noted, Struve was "an odd bird" even to his fellow G...

       William R. Jenvey of Marietta, Ohio enlisted as a musician with Battery C, of the 1st West Virginia Light Artillery on January 25, 1862. The English-born Jenvey had just turned 17 years of age when he went off to war; accounts vary as to whether he served as a bugler or a drummer; his enlistment record says a bugler, his obituary says a drummer. Regardless, Jenvey provides a unique perspective of his battery's action during the Second Battle of Bull Run which occurred August 29-30, 1862.     After the war, Jenvey returned to Marietta and attended college, becoming an Episcoplian minister and going west to serve in Nevada then California. In 1883, he moved to the east coast where he served as rector of St. Paul's Church in Hoboken, New Jersey until his retirement in 1913. Through many of through years, he was an active member of Lafayette Post G.A.R. in New York, and left some vivid accounts of his experiences during the war. The account below was one...

       Among the technological innovations brought about by the Civil War was the widespread use of the telegraph for battlefield communications. One of the more intriguing early uses of the telegraph on the battlefield occurred on May 31, 1862 during the Battle of Fair Oaks, Virginia when Professor Thaddeus Lowe and Parker Spring, superintendent of Telegraph Construction for the U.S. Army, went aloft in one of Lowe’s balloons, the Intrepid . As Spring describes below, while Lowe observed the Confederate army’s movements with a pair of field glasses, Spring tapped away on his telegraph key in the balloon, providing real time intelligence to General George B. McClellan’s headquarters of the battle in progress. In much the same way that drones today provide real time images and information regarding enemy movements and dispositions, Lowe and Spring’s innovative marriage of two emerging technologies helped cut a hole through the fog of war, potentially allowing battle...

     In the aftermath of Gettysburg, Second Lieutenant Joseph Humphrey Hollis of the 25th Ohio was both proud and appalled by the losses his regiment had sustained. "We have formed our regiment into two companies and the entire number is 80 guns," he noted. "The surplus are a few teamsters, cooks, hospital attendants, and a few more broken down soldiers than never carry a gun; all included, from 130-140 men and that my friends is all that is left of our once splendid and proud regiment."       Whitelaw Reid recorded that "the 25th went into action with 220 men and lost 20 killed, 113 wounded, and 50 missing. The majority of the officers had been killed or wounded and the regiment was commanded by a first lieutenant who had been wounded in the first day's battle."  Few regiments suffered as heavily as the 25th Ohio at Gettysburg, and this was after losing 174 men two months prior at Chancellorsville.  The regiment was part of the Second Brigad...

       In the days following the Battle of Shiloh, the facilities at Pittsburg Landing proved woefully inadequate to deal with the thousands of wounded men, so it was decided to send many of the sick and wounded to permanent hospitals located in the North. The patients were shipped north along the Tennessee River to hospitals located along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, some of them being sent as far away as Cincinnati and St. Louis. The scenes aboard the hospital vessels beggar description. “As each victim, borne on a stretcher, crossed the gangplank, he was divested of his mud-bespattered blood-stained clothing, carefully washed and wiped, given a clean shirt and drawers, then was tenderly laid on his cot. The next sufferer took the next cot and so the work progressed until every cot on the boat had its suffering occupant,” remembered Dr. Charles Cochran. “The whole number of patients on our boat was divided into wards with from 15 to 20 in each. Each ward was ...

       When General William S. Rosecrans first met the soldiers of the 19th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the summer of 1861 in western Virginia, the newly-minted Buckeye brigadier was less than impressed with what he saw. Calling them "the band box regiment," Rosecrans brought them along with his column of three Indiana regiments in a flanking maneuver at the Battle of Rich Mountain on July 11, 1861, and it was here that the 19th Ohio started to build its reputation for steadiness, courage, and efficiency. Coming under a sudden unexpected fire, the Indiana regiments charged forward bravely but all discipline was lost as the men started to fight on their own hook. The officers of the 19th Ohio begged Rosecrans to send them forward, and when he finally assented, they made their presence known in dramatic fashion.       " The 19 th  Ohio, which had been formed into column of companies under cover, now wheeled into line, and with the exception of t...

     A week after the victory at Bull Run, General Joseph Johnston and Pierre G.T. Beauregard published an address to the soldiers of the Southern army. "It is with the profoundest emotions of gratitude to an overruling God, whose hand is manifest in protecting our homes and our liberties, that we, your Generals commanding, are enabled in the name of the whole country to thank you for that patriotic courage, that heroic gallantry, and that devoted daring exhibited by you in the actions of the 18th and 21st of July, by which the host of the enemy was scattered and a signal and glorious victory achieved. They left upon the field nearly every piece of the artillery, a large portion of their arms, equipment, baggage, stores, and almost every one of their dead and wounded amounting together with the prisoners to many thousands, and thus the Northern hosts were driven by you from Virginia."     Behind the high words of praise were men who knew intimately how difficult...

In the aftermath of the Battle of Mill Springs Kentucky in January 1862, two colonels, one from Alabama and one from Minnesota, sat down to write their wives back home to assure them of their safety and to recount what they had just witnessed. For both men, Mill Springs marked the first time that either of them had led men into battle. Colonel William B. Wood of the 16 th Alabama Infantry, a noted attorney from Florence, remarked to his wife Sarah that the “protecting providence of God sheltered me from harm and I came off the field without a scratch.” To Colonel Wood, Mill Springs   was “a most terrific and fierce battle of over three hours which resulted in the defeat and terrible slaughter of our troops.” His Federal opponent, Colonel Horatio Phillips Van Cleve of the 2 nd Minnesota Infantry, a West Point graduate turned civilian engineer from Minneapolis, commented to his wife Charlotte that “the battle of the 19 th is a constant theme of conversation with the officers a...

       November 30, 1864 is often associated with the lopsided Federal victory at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, where an army of 33,000 Confederates charged repeatedly against a line of breastworks held by a Federal army of 30,000 men and lost 6,252 men in the process against Federal losses of 2,326. The battered Confederate survivors of Franklin might have taken some grim solace in the fact that a few hundred miles away in southwestern South Carolina, a small Confederate army of 1,400 men gained an even more lopsided victory against 5,000 Federals at the Battle of Honey Hill. The similarities between the two battles abound with the roles reversed: the Confederates were on the retreat and had taken up a position at Honey Hill to protect their line of communications (the Charleston & Savannah Railroad), had built up a line of breastworks, and the Federals then battered themselves to a bloody pulp against them for hours, losing 755 casualties and inflicting ...

  One does not often think of Nebraska in the context of the Civil War; the garden state of the Great Plains was not yet even a state during the conflict- that would not occur until 1867, two years after the end of hostilities. If one thinks of Nebraska and the Civil War, it might be within the context of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the concept of popular sovereignty, where settlers would be able to determine for themselves whether or not to permit slavery within their territory. This precept led to a clear precursor of the Civil War in “Bleeding Kansas” during the late 1850s where pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions took to arms and violence; pro-slavery men apparently didn’t bother trying to sway Nebraska which remained free of violence during the period. There were far more buffalo (American bison) than people living in Nebraska in the 1860s, but their days were numbered. In 1840, it was estimated that 35 million bison lived upon the Great Plains; by 1870, that number ...

    George Rufus Gear spent most of his life in Marietta, Ohio; he was born there on December 1, 1840, attended Marietta College, and was a Baptist minister in town for many years. Gear died in Marietta October 2, 1931 at age 90, one of the city's last surviving Civil War veterans.       In August 1861, he signed his name to rolls of Co. B of the 39th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and spent most of the next four years far away from Marietta; he re-enlisted in 1864 and was successively promoted to corporal and then near the end of the war to the rank of sergeant. The regiment, sometimes called the Groesbeck Regiment, was originally armed with .69 caliber rifles altered by Miles Greenwood and was the first from the state of Ohio to enter Missouri, which it did in August 1861.       The 39th served entirely within the western theater. It first saw action at New Madrid, Missouri and Island No. 10 under General John Pope, then joined Halleck's army...

Once in a while, I take a break from blogging about the Civil War to feature the work of a fellow author. Today’s guest on Dan Masters’ Civil War Chronicles is Dylan James, author of a new work entitled Brothers , a historical novel based on the Civil War experiences of his Welsh ancestors who served in the 27 th and 56 th Ohio regiments. The Evans family emigrated to the U.S. from Wales in the summer of 1839, settling in the iron-mining region of Jackson County in the southeastern portion of Ohio. The father worked as a farmer, and moved to neighboring Gallia County a few years later where the he died in 1852. The three older brothers, Richard, David, and John, were thrown into life on their own at a very young age, but found work at the Gallia Furnace as colliers. It was a hard life, one symbolized by long hours of back-breaking labor, but their time in the furnace served to toughen the brothers and helped prepare them for the rigors of their forthcoming service in the Civil War...

     The regimental colors of the 76th Ohio were captured at Ringgold Gap, Georgia on November 27, 1863 by the 1 st Arkansas Infantry, and languished in the collection of General William J. Hardee for nearly half a century. The flag was arranged to be returned to the survivors of the 76 th Ohio during the annual United Confederate Veterans reunion held in Jacksonville, Florida on May 6, 1914. Governor James M. Cox of Ohio thanked the veterans in gray for their generosity in returning the banner, and assured them “it will be forever preserved as an emblem of their heroism in defending it, and of your bravery in winning it.”      However, survivors of the 1 st Arkansas contested that since they captured the flag, they should be the ones to return it. The flag went home with the Ohioans, but another ceremony was planned where the survivors of the 1 st Arkansas would formally return the banner. As such, the flag was formally returned at a joint 76 th Ohio...

Bullet magnet: anything or anyone that is prone to draw gunfire on their position. ~ Urban Dictionary      While not a term commonly used in the 19th century, if the 41st Ohio Volunteers had any particular soldier who was a bullet magnet, it was Captain James W. McCleery of Co. A. The young Ohioan had his clothing clipped at Rich Mountain on July 11, 1861, lost his right arm at Shiloh on April 7, 1862, then took a severe hit in his leg at Stones River on December 31, 1862. Now serving on the staff of Brigadier General William B. Hazen as his assistant adjutant general, one wonders after reading his account below of the ferocious fighting of September 19, 1863 how McCleery escaped a third wound at the Battle of Chickamauga.      James McCleery was born December 2, 1837 in Mecca, Ohio and prior to the outbreak of the Civil War was a budding attorney attending Oberlin College, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment in northeastern Ohio. Upon the attack on Fort Sum...

In January 1862, the 66 th Ohio Volunteer Infantry left the state with 900 men bound for service in northern Virginia. Assigned to Erastus B. Tyler’s brigade of James Shields’ division along with the 5 th and 7 th Ohio regiments, the 66 th Ohio campaigned for months in the Shenandoah Valley against Stonewall Jackson’s forces before taking a shellacking at the hard-fought Battle of Port Republic on June 9, 1862. Two months later, the 66 th Ohio took part into another desperate struggle against Stonewall Jackson’s army at Cedar Mountain; the regiment lost 94 casualties and was so reduced that only 60 men of the regiment were left in the ranks that evening. Two days after the defeat at Cedar Mountain, army commander General John Pope reviewed the regiment. A few weeks before, Pope had complimented the men of the regiment, stating “I want these men to give tone to my army.” The battered remnant that stood at attention before him that August morning must have presented quite the contra...

    In writing his memoirs years after the war, Private  John Henry King of Co. D of the 9th Texas Infantry provided one of the finest accounts of the Confederate assault on the cedars at the Battle of Stones River. I've featured several accounts on this blog from Federal participants in this particular sector of the battlefield, but King's is the first to present the story from the other side, and he has quite a tale to tell.     The 9th Texas Infantry was the only Texas infantry regiment then attached to the Army of Tennessee; four dismounted cavalry regiments served in Ector's brigade of McCown's division while the hard riding 8th Texas Cavalry was serving in Wharton's brigade of Wheeler's cavalry. The Texans were assigned to General Preston Smith's brigade of General Benjamin Frank Cheatham's division of Leonidas Polk's Corps. General Smith was away during the Stones River campaign and his brigade was ably led by Colonel Alfred Vaughan of the 13t...

The hero of Manila Bay in 1898 cut his teeth with Farragut in Mobile Bay in 1864     Charles Vernon Gridley was not even 20 years old when he joined the crew of the sloop-of-war U.S.S. Oneida in September 1863. The Indiana native had grown up in Hillsdale, Michigan and attended Hillsdale College before gaining an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and was sent to sea along with the rest of his class in September 1863. The Oneida was his first at-sea assignment, and the ship was nearly as new as Ensign Gridley having moved down the ways at the Brooklyn Navy Yard November 20, 1861. A 1,488-ton screw sloop of war, the Oneida was 201 feet long, more than 33 feet abeam and was armed with 10 cannon, the largest being 30-pounders. A total of 186 officers and men manned the vessel which on a good day could sail along a 12 knots. She was truly a "fast ship going in harm's way."     The Oneida had been assigned to the West Gulf Blockading Squadron under Ad...

By February 1865, Surgeon Lyman Augustus Brewer of the 111 th Ohio had gained the reputation as being the finest surgeon in the brigade. “Perhaps no other man in the whole brigade was so universally beloved by his comrades in arms as Dr. Brewer,” a biography noted in 1878. “His whole heart was in the cause of his country and until the last foe surrendered, he remained at his post nobly performing his duties. His army record bears honorable testimony to his skill as a surgeon and his thoughtful care for the suffering soldiers and his name will long be held in remembrance by many who can never forget his tender ministrations on the battlefield.” The native New Yorker was practicing medicine in Toledo, Ohio when he was commissioned surgeon of the regiment in August 1862, leaving his wife Lucretia behind with her family in Hillsdale, Michigan. Surgeon Brewer had seen action in over 20 western theater battles before he, along with two divisions of the 23 rd Army Corps, landed in North C...