Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

     M ost of us are familiar with Washington Irving’s 19 th century classic Halloween story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in which the lanky Ichabod Crane is chased through the woods by the Headless Horseman and disappears when the Horseman throws a pumpkin at him. It was a well-known and popular work in the 19 th century and remains one of our most enduring pieces of American folklore and storytelling and has shaped how Americans view Halloween. The Headless Horseman rears his horse as he prepares to throw the fatal pumpkin at a terrified Ichabod Crane in John Quidor's 1858 depiction of Washington Irving's famous short story.            Interestingly, the protagonist of the The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , Ichabod Crane, drew his name from someone Washington Irving had met in real life, a rather husky U.S. Army officer named (you guessed it) Ichabod Bennett Crane. The real Ichabod Crane was born in 1787 in Elizabeth, New ...

Vermont State Militia Button featuring the state seal and motto of Freedom and Unity.

          T he Second Battle of Bull Run was still underway when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton put out the call for civilian volunteers to cross the Potomac River into Virginia and assist the army with the thousands of wounded soldiers. “There is a pressing need for the services of surgeons and nurses (males) to attend to the wounded of the great battles recently,” the Washington Evening Star reported in their August 30, 1862 edition. “We are requested by the War Department to call for such volunteers from this point to repair at once to Alexandria, prepared to stay near the scene of action for some days present. On reaching Alexandria, they will find at the railroad depot provision made for their prompt transmission to points where their services may be needed.”           About 500 civilians, most of them clerks and employees of the Federal government, responded to Secretary Stanton’s app...

The Sixth Vermont Saves the Sixth Army Corps      B y Monday May 4 th 1863, the Chancellorsville campaign was well on the way to becoming another discouraging defeat for the Army of the Potomac. General Hooker’s forces had been hemmed in the previous day and now General Robert E. Lee turned his attention to the 19,000 men of General John Sedgwick’s 6 th Army Corps that had crossed the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and were marching west to join Hooker. After bitter fighting at Salem Church, Sedgwick’s men formed a defensive circle protecting their path of retreat at Banks’ Ford and around 5 o’clock that evening, Lee made his attack.           The 6 th Vermont under Colonel Elisha L. Barney was among those Federals who faced Lee’s evening assault. The regiment lay in support of a battery and watched in horror as the Federal line in their front crumpled under the Confederate attack led by General Harry Hays’ Louisianans and...

T hree days out of the port of New York, Second Lieutenant George Philander Davis of the 18 th New York Independent Battery found himself aboard the transport Illinois hundreds of miles from land in the middle of a shrieking gale.       " I found the men beginning to look pale and vomiting; I felt well; wind continued to rise; sides of the vessel full of men sick; the rest laughing at those that were sick, which made it very amusing," he wrote. "I felt well until about noon; went down in the cabin with the rest of the officers, where I soon got very dizzy and sick; came up on deck; wished I could have some good friend hold my head; could not vomit; drank warm salt water; all to no purpose, only to make me feel worse; the wind continued to rise; I felt as though I didn’t care much whether it rose or stopped blowing."     Lieutenant Davis and his battery were making a sea voyage as part of General Nathaniel P. Banks' expedition to the Department of the...

     A week into Sherman’s March to the Sea, the 20 th Army Corps captured the most important political objective of the campaign: the Georgia state capitol at Milledgeville. Milledgeville was the fifth Confederate state capitol captured by Union forces during the Civil War: Nashville, Baton Rouge, Jackson, and Little Rock having preceded it in 1862 and 1863. Besides being the seat of power of Governor Joseph Brown, Milledgeville also was home of the state arsenal and General Sherman wanted those arms in the hands of his soldiers.     On November 23, 1864, about 200 officers from the 20 th Army Corps marched into the Georgia State Capitol where the assembly, many of the participants who had been active in state and local governments back North, staged a sham assembly of the Georgia Legislature. Alcohol provided the subtext for the proceedings. Today's post features accounts from two officers who witnessed the event: Captain Moses Summer of the 149 th ...

  T he carnage surrounding his family’s homestead near Guntown, Mississippi in the aftermath of the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads left local resident Samuel Agnew speechless. The war had been brought literally to his doorstep.           “I walked through the rooms and found everything turned upside down and nearly everything we had taken from us,” he wrote in his diary. “Dead and wounded men were lying in the house. The walls of the house had been perforated by a good many bullets. Negroes and white men both plundered the house, and nothing could move their hearts to pity, but with vandal hands they rifled trunks, bureaus, and rooms. The garden and yard fences were torn down. Before I reached the house, I found the road filled with shoes and articles of every description which had been thrown away by the Federals in the retreat. Soldiers lay stretched cold in death on the roadside. I saw two before I came to the gate. When I saw these t...

R ecovered from a severe head wound sustained during the Battle of Chickamauga the previous September, Captain John H. Weller of the 4 th Kentucky rejoined his company in time to take part in the Battle of Resaca. The action of May 14 th , 1864, matched the intensity he remembered from Chickamauga and as Weller begins the article, “the next time I get into a battle where the shape of our line is a horseshoe, I want to be on the outside.”           Weller and his comrades in the 4 th Kentucky soon found themselves under assault by Federals from both 14 th and 23 rd Army Corps. “The Union soldiers, after some delay, came tearing down the hill to the branch and pushing through made directly for us,” Weller wrote. “It was exciting. When within about a hundred yards, we turned loose on them and death in all its appalling forms commenced by hundreds on the 14 th of May 1864. Column after column came down in full view and moved right toward ...

       T wenty years after the Battle of Chickamauga, Captain John H. Weller of the 4 th Kentucky Infantry could still see the determination in the eyes of General John Breckinridge as his beloved Orphan Brigade penetrated behind the Federal lines on the morning of Sunday September 20 th . The Kentuckians were in a heap of trouble but didn’t know it; they had overrun their support and now Federal reinforcements were bearing down on the single depleted regiment.           “He sat erect on his horse, his whole body seeming to indicate attention to the business on hand,” Captain Weller wrote. “His quick mind soon comprehended the situation and he spoke his words of command in a natural tone of voice. We discovered we were alone in our advanced position with no knowledge of our gallant 2 nd and 9 th . Before we could charge the rear which we had unconsciously gained, the enemy had received heavy reinforcements and thrown a...

       T he Battle of Mine Run may have been short on action but it certainly was long on misery as remembered by Sergeant Barkley Cooper of the 126th Ohio of the Third Army Corps. After spending a long night in the bitter cold without his beloved hardtack, Cooper woke up on the morning of Saturday November 28, 1863 with the ear-piercing shrieks and groans of a wounded man weltering in agony out in the nearby woods.       " Early in the morning it commenced raining which continued the better part of the day; occasional cannonading was heard at different times during the day," he wrote. "We marched three or four miles during the day and would march a few rods, stop and stack arms, then in five or ten minutes we would take arms and march a few rods further, and so on all day enough to worry the patience of a wooden man. It was full 10 o’clock at night before we got in our position in line on Mine River. I have heard of mud knee deep, but I never rea...

  T he letter began like one a mother would never hope to receive from her son. “ I am alive and tolerable well for a man who has seven bullet holes in his hide,” wrote Orderly Sergeant Linus Bascom of the 7 th Wisconsin to his mother Sally (Webb) Bascom in Johnston, Ohio. It was the first word Sally had heard from her 31-year-old son, a native of Trumbull County, Ohio, since the 7 th Wisconsin took part in the battle of South Mountain. As part of the soon-to-be-famous Iron Brigade of the Army of the Potomac, initial reports stated that the 7th Wisconsin had suffered very heavily in the engagement. It was clear that Linus had fought with determination  at South Mountain. “ I had fired five or six times when I got hit in the face, on the right side of the nose,” he wrote. “As soon as the blood stopped a little, I went to firing again. We were in an open plowed field under a heavy crossfire. Our regiment had fallen back a little from where I was firing behind a rock. I had f...

      T he role of the 1 st Mississippi Sharpshooters was to lead the division into battle and cover it in the event of a retreat. Assigned to General Mansfield Lovell's division of the Confederate army at the Battle of Corinth, “we were anxious to show our hand in the line of warfare set apart for is, for our small size made us the jest of the other regiments,” one of its members William Cox Holmes later wrote. Then serving as a lieutenant in Co. B, Lieutenant Holmes recalled the sights of the battlefield after the Confederates charged on a Union battery on October 3, 1862. “Going up to the line just occupied by the 14 th Wisconsin, there was presented to my gaze a sight that could but appeal to the heart of the hardest soldier: men dead, dying, and wounded, all in a line just as the regiment stood,” Holmes wrote. “The first man I saw alive had in his arms a man dead, shot through the head. ‘My friend, are you hurt?’ I asked. ‘No, but this is my poor dead brothe...

D uring the Corinth campaign, the 50 th Illinois under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Swartout was part of Colonel Silas Baldwin’s Third Brigade of General Thomas Davies’ Second Division of the Army of West Tennessee. It served alongside the 7 th and 57 th Illinois regiments. As related in the account below, the 50 th Illinois was engaged on both days of the battle of Corinth and actually took part in the house-to-house fighting that swirled through the streets of town on October 4 th . According to the author of this letter, Captain Timothy D. McGillicuddy, “the streets of Corinth were flooded with human gore.” Captain McGillicuddy’s account of the Battle of Corinth saw publication in the September 22, 1888, edition of the Ohio Soldier , a newspaper similar to the National Tribune .