Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

     On the night of June 30, 1863, the Ohioans attached to the 11 th Army Corps under the command of Major General Oliver O. Howard lay in camps around Emmitsburg, Maryland. “That night at Emmitsburg, with its recollections, is to me as sacred as holy writ,” recalled Leonidas Jewett of the 61 st Ohio. “The excitement, the knowledge of a great battle soon to be fought with the killing and wounding of many of the brave boys of Ohio and the other loyal states of the Union; the wonder what fate awaited us, were all thoughts that flew through the minds of the soldiers of our army who camped at Emmitsburg. Of my own regiment, I remember that night Colonel Stephen J. McGroarty, Lieutenant Colonel William L. Bown, Major D.C. Beckett, and many others in the next days that gave up their lives that this vast Republic might live.” The XI Army Corps headquarters flag belonging to Major General Oliver O. Howard who led the corps for much of its existence.     ...

       The story of Colonel Abel Streight’s mule raid in April and May of 1863 has previously been discussed on the blog through the diary of Color Sergeant Perry Hagerty of the 73 rd Indiana , but in this post I will relay the story of the raid from the Confederate cavalry under General Nathan Bedford Forrest who pursued Streight’s force across Alabama and into Georgia.           Captain Moses Haney Clift of Chattanooga, Tennessee was the son of William and Nancy (Brooks) Clift and was born August 25, 1836, in Soddy, Tennessee. An attorney, Clift had just begun his law practice in Chattanooga when the war began in 1861. The issue of the war split the Clift family: the father and two sons joined the Union army while Moses and another brother joined the Confederacy. Moses Clift raised Co. H of the 36 th Tennessee Infantry but after seven months transferred to the Starnes’ 4 th Tennessee Cavalry and by the time of Strei...

Orderly Sergeant Horatio B. Turrill served in Co. K of the 72 nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry and had only been serving as orderly for about two months when he was captured June 12, 1864, near Ripley, Mississippi during the disastrous retreat from the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads. He remained in a series of Confederate prisoner of war camps until he was paroled on April 1, 1865, near Vicksburg. In the winter of 1864, Sergeant Turrill reported how the Confederate prison authorities tried to recruit soldiers from amongst the prisoners. “The Confederate authorities believed they could succeed in obtaining accessions to their forces from the foreign-born portion of the prisoners and issued orders to have a list of the foreigners made out but did not state the object they had in view,” Turrill wrote. “The rumor soon circulated in Camp Lawton (Millen) that the natives were to be kept while all the foreign born were to be paroled at once and sent home. Of course, everybody turned foreigner imme...

This selection of Williams Cleaners from my personal collection shows each of the three types that were produced during the war. From left to right: Type I, Type II in the center, and the shorter Type IIIs on the right. Williams Cleaners are abundant in the collecting market and usually sell for just a few dollars apiece. The cartridge box shown is a .58 caliber box produced by Smith, Bourn, and Co. of Hartford, Connecticut while the cap pouch is a product of Emerson Gaylord of Chicopee, Massachusetts.       At the outset of the Civil War, inventor Elijah D. Williams of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania decided to contribute to the Union war effort by casting standard .58 caliber Burton-style ammunition for rifle muskets, producing thousands of three-ring bullets with a regulation cone cavity weighing (depending on the variation) between 458 and 481 grains. Upon further study, Williams decided that improvements could be made in the existing bullet design that could offer im...

       By early April 1862, the Federals encamped at Pittsburg Landing had settled into a comfortable routine of camp life. Drill twice per day with regular meals acclimated the new troops comprising Colonel Ralph Buckland’s brigade to the army life. Writing from camp on April 1 st , Private John M. Lemmon of the 72 nd Ohio observed that “quiet reigns with this portion of the army though we know not at what time we may get the order to march. Old Sol begins to pour down his hottest rays upon us, making the shady side of the tent, tree, or the like the most bearable. The weather is quite spring-like but vegetation does not seem to come forward as rapidly as the warm weather would warrant. The trees have not yet put on their livery of green nor had the grass started but little. The Rebels are reported strengthening themselves at Corinth and have great numbers. They doubtless want to play their old game on us and keep us back by reporting great numbers on their own sid...

       The story of the 16 th Indiana regiment at the Battle of Richmond, Kentucky is similar to most of the Federal regiments that fought at that battle. One would think with a low regimental number like 16 that the Hoosiers would have been in service since 1861; in a way they had. The 16 th Indiana had two regimental organizations: the first entered the service in May 1861 but only had a one-year term. The regiment saw service with the General Nathaniel P. Banks’ army in the eastern theater and took part in the fight at Ball’s Bluff before moving into northern Virginia and mustering out of service on May 14, 1862.           After Lincoln’s call for 300,000 more troops in July 1862, it was decided to reorganize the 16 th Indiana on a three-years basis and the regiment was quickly recruited to full strength and placed under the command of Colonel Thomas J. Lucas who had served in the first organization of the regiment...

       As the Federal army went into camp near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee in March 1862, one of the points of interest visited by the soldiers were the graves of the half dozen Confederate soldiers killed during the skirmish on March 1, 1862. On that day, the timberclad gunboats Tyler and Lexington carrying two companies of Illinois sharpshooters engaged a Rebel battery at the Landing supported by the 18 th Louisiana Infantry. The gunboats laid down a heavy fire of grape shot and shells which allowed a contingent of sailors and the sharpshooters to land and burn a nearby house where the battery had been positioned. After this brief fight, the Federals returned to the gunboats having lost two men killed, six wounded, and three missing.           A few weeks later, after the Federals had occupied Pittsburg Landing, William J. Srofe of Co. K of the 48 th Ohio visited the Landing and recorded his impressions of the has...

      For more than a year, the Army of the Cumberland had sought to capture the strategic city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Nestled into a bend of the Tennessee River and dominated by the towering heights of Lookout Mountain to the west, Chattanooga was the major railroad junction and primary supply depot for Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee. The key to the Confederate heartland lay through Chattanooga and by early September that key was about to slide into the Union's pocket.      General Thomas L. Crittenden's 21st Army Corps had been demonstrating against Chattanooga since late August, a feint designed to keep Braxton Bragg's attention away from the Tennessee River crossings further downstream where General William S. Rosecrans intended to move the 14th Corps and 20th Corps of his army across the river, aiming to fall on Bragg's rear and force his departure from Chattanooga. The ploy worked, and on September 9th the Confederates evacuated the city. Lieut...

       It took the battle of Chancellorsville for Private Jacob Buroway of the 107 th Ohio to see the difference in how Southern civilians treated their soldiers compared with the indifference and scorn he felt Northerners had for the boys in blue.           “On Sunday about 10 o’clock, our men took a lot of prisoners and some of those prisoners were wounded seriously, especially one who was such a good-looking boy,” Buroway remembered. “He had his right arm shot off and one of them gals lead that boy to the hospital and the blood of his arm ran down over her silk dress that she was all one blood. That looked hard but she said that she would stick to him or else die with him. Now you can see how they stick together, they ain’t like folks in the North now. There is enough of the people in the North that just laughs at us soldier boys to be such fools as to go and fight but they never think that we stand between the enemy...

       Under normal circumstances, the duties of the provost guards hovered around the rear areas of the army, gathering up stragglers and escorting prisoners, safely distant from the firing line. But the fighting at Peach Tree Creek was so fierce that Sergeant Joseph Newbury of the 79 th Ohio reported that men were being shot down around him as he tried to escort a group of Confederate prisoners to the rear.           “As my men and the prisoners were very anxious to get out of range, I told them they might go on the run to the top of the ridge across the creek, but I did not feel like running,” he later wrote. “A soldier ran past me a little to my left with his gun, knapsack, and all his equipment and just before he reached the log he pitched forward on his face. A bullet had struck him in the back of the neck and came out through his chin, killing him instantly.” The 79 th Ohio was part of the First Brigade, Third...

      The hardest fighting performed by the Federal army at the Battle of Monocacy fell to the ten regiments comprising the Third Division of the 6th Army Corps under the command of General James B. Ricketts. These hardened Army of the Potomac veterans had been pulled from the lines around Petersburg, Virginia on July 6th and sent to western Maryland in response to pleas for reinforcements to stop General Jubal Early's invasion of the state. Ricketts' veterans arrived at Frederick, Maryland just in time to take anchor General Lew Wallace's left flank near the Monocacy River. The following day, General Early pushed his troops across the river and assailed the two brigades in a sharp and brutal battle; the Federals fought well, delaying Early for a day, but ultimately lost the battle.      Among Rickett's veterans was a young New Jersey boat builder named Roderick A. Clark. Born January 25, 1844 in Pennsylvania to Irish parents, Roderick enlisted in the 14th ...

       On Friday June 10, 1864, a Federal expeditionary force of approximately 8,100 men under the command of General Samuel Sturgis clashed with the 3,500 men of General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s command at Brice’s Crossroads, Mississippi. It was a sharp clash fought amongst the burning heat and humidity of a hot Mississippi summer day, and one which ended in disaster for Sturgis’ command. Sturgis’ infantry regiments, forced to double quick the last several miles to the battlefield, put up a good fight but were so worn out and fatigued that the Federal line soon collapsed and fell back in disorder towards Memphis. In the ensuing days, Forrest pressed the pursuit and picked up more than 1,600 prisoners practically wrecking Sturgis’ force. As one Federal put it, it was “a great disaster.” “Students of military tactics agree that the Brice’s Crossroads engagement was marked by the hardest kind of fighting and that it marked a brilliant tactical victory for Forrest,” s...

       In November 1882, Major William Y. Baker who had formerly served in the 18 th Tennessee Cavalry of Forrest’s command penned the following memoir of the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads in a letter to one of his adversaries on that battlefield, Gustavus Gessner who was at the time a hospital steward serving with the 72 nd Ohio Infantry. The circumstances which led to Baker’s letter was Gessner’s very public effort to derail General Samuel Sturgis’ appointment to command of a national soldiers’ home. Gessner was captured in the aftermath of the battle, and like many of Sturgis’ soldiers, he held the General responsible for the disaster and felt he had no business being given command of a Johnny detail let alone a national soldiers’ home!   Baker’s letter resides in the Gustavus Gessner papers held at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Fremont, Ohio. I have interspersed some quotes from other troopers of Forrest’s command to supplement Baker’s a...

       The 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry had by the beginning of June 1862 become one of the most well-traveled regiments in Virginia. As part of General James Shields' division, the Roosters had fought at the First Battle of Kernstown on March 23rd and since had marched all over the Shenandoah and Luray Valleys, and even on to Fredericksburg where on May 23rd they were reviewed by President Lincoln. Stonewall Jackson's late May offensive sent the 7th marching again to the Shenandoah aiming to cut off Jackson's exit from the valley. The resulting Battle of Port Republic fought on Monday morning June 9, 1862 remained a point of pride for the regiment, even if the battle was a defeat. The regiment went into action with 327 men and lost a dozen killed, 63 wounded, and 10 missing; it was a soldier's battle best told by the soldiers themselves.      I present below accounts from six members of the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry who tell the story of Port Republi...

          In the early afternoon hours of Monday June 9, 1862, Ned Moore, a gunner serving in the Rockbridge Artillery of Stonewall Jackson’s army, rested in camp near Port Republic, Virginia grateful to have survived the battle, and still in a bit of amazement that the army had escaped destruction. Over the past two weeks, his battery had rolled up and down the Shenandoah Valley hotly pursued by three Federal armies all determined to hem in Stonewall’s force; they nearly caught them at Cross Keys the day before and the bitter fight of Port Republic that very morning had been a close shave that cost Moore’s battery one of its guns. “Such a spectacle as we here witnessed and exultingly enjoyed possibly has no parallel,” he later wrote. “After a rapid retreat of more than 100 miles to escape from the clutches of three armies hotly pursuing on flank and rear, one of which had outstripped us, we paused to contemplate the situation. On the groun...

       During the first week of June 1862, Stonewall Jackson’s army was being pursued up the Shenandoah Valley by two Federal armies. On Jackson’s right shielded by the Massanutten Mountains, General James Shields’ and Edward O.C. Ord’s divisions marched up the parallel Luray Valley aiming to cut off Jackson’s exit while General John Fremont’s Mountain Department followed Jackson up the Valley Pike.           Colonel Turner Ashby, commanding Jackson’s cavalry, covered the army’s retreat but on June 6 th near Harrisonburg he fell into a sharp fight called the Battle of Good’s Farm with the Pennsylvania Bucktails that cost him his life. The popular story is that Ashby was gunned down by one of the Bucktails (or by friendly fire), but the author of the following account, serving with the 1 st Connecticut Cavalry, was also there and claimed that Ashby was gunned down by a German serving in one of Colonel Julius Stahel’s Ne...

       During the Battle of Chickamauga, the 18 th Ohio Battery had been knocked around a bit during the several engagements from September 18-20 th , but its gunners remained defiant and determined even after the Union defeat. Even though the battle was over, the gunners of the battery still contended with their Confederate opponents on a daily basis as one gunner describes in the following letter.           From his perch on Stringer’s Ridge on the north side of the Tennessee River, he could see the Confederates directly across the river on Lookout Mountain. “It is now infested with Rebs whose signal flags can be distinctly seen from where I write,” one gunner noted.   “They planted two guns on the side of Lookout opposite Lieutenant Bierce’s section the other evening and let loose at us, but a few well-directed shots from one of our best gunners soon silenced them. Our sharpshooters and theirs peg away at each o...

     On the afternoon of August 30, 1862, the 5 th New York Volunteer Infantry, also called Duryee’s Zouaves, found themselves in a tight spot unlike any other they had faced in their 16 months of service. Their regiment along with the 10 th New York were the first ones struck by General James Longstreet’s assault and in ten minutes of ferocious combat, the New Yorkers lost 332 of the 525 men in the ranks, 121 of those casualties being killed or missing. Private Alfred Davenport of Co. G was amazed that he made it off the field alive. “While running down the hill towards the Run, I saw my comrades dropping on all sides, canteens struck and flying to pieces, haversacks cut off, rifles knocked to pieces; it was a perfect hail of bullets,” Davenport recalled. “I was expecting to get mustered out every second, but on and on I went, the balls hissing by my head. I felt one strike me on the hip, just grazing me, and only cutting a hole through my pants. I tried to turn arou...