Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

  L ieutenant Colonel Joseph M. Bounds of the 11 th Texas Cavalry fought in the opening action of the Battle of Stones River on December 31, 1862, and escaped harm while officers all around him went down with wounds. To be sure, the command staff of the regiment was gutted: Colonel John Burks was mortally wounded, while the adjutant and sergeant major also went down in rapid order, leaving Bounds in command of the regiment. The Texan’s luck nearly ran out that afternoon when his regiment charged against a reinforced line of Federal artillery arrayed along the Nashville Pike. “At this time, the grape, canister shot, and bombs were flying like autumn leaves playing before a tornado,” he wrote after the battle. “I went into the second charge without the mark of a bullet about my person or horses and came out with 33 bullet holes: 28 in my blankets, 2 in my saddle bags, 1 in my curry comb, and 2 in my horse, one of them in her head which knocked her down. I left her for dead and ch...

  I n the closing hours of daylight on Tuesday, December 30, 1862, the last of the three divisions of General Alexander M. McCook’s corps maneuvered into position south of Wilkinson Pike near Stones River. Colonel William P. Carlin’s brigade moved through a thick cedar forest and upon exiting the trees, spied a six-gun Confederate battery across the swale, apparently without infantry support. Carlin’s impetuous division commander Jefferson C. Davis wanted those guns taken and ordered the 21 st Illinois to get the job done. The battery was commanded by 23-year-old Captain Felix H. Robertson. A cadet at West Point who offered his services to the Confederacy when his native Texas seceded, Robertson’s fearful gunners nicknamed him “Comanche.” This sobriquet stemmed from both Felix’s swarthy appearance (some soldiers whispered that he was a half breed) and from his savage brand of discipline. However much his men disliked him, none dared to use the nickname in his presence due to Rob...

B y 7 o'clock on the morning of December 31, 1862, the fighting at Stones River had already turned seriously awry for the Federal army. As Richard Johnson's division began its retreat, hundreds of men fled north towards the rear where they were stopped by the provost guards. One of them, Private Otis W. Strong of the 44th Illinois, described this discouraging task.      " The provost guard of each division was ordered to the rear with pointed bayonets and loaded rifles with orders from General Rosecrans to bayonet or shoot every straggler that made his appearance," Strong remembered. "Being mostly new troops and the battle raging with all its fury, back they would come and back they were forced into the fight. One poor fellow came back on the full run and it became my duty to halt him, asking him at the same time if he was wounded. He shouted, “Let me go, let me go! I am demoralized as hell!” and, in his own language, if this war continued much longer we shall al...

E nglish-born Charles Lewis Francis marched towards Murfreesboro as a bugler serving in Company B of the 88 th Illinois Volunteers under the command of Colonel Francis T. Sherman. His account of the Stones River campaign is remarkable for not only its candor but its attention to detail and is one of my favorite accounts describing the opening days of the campaign. This excerpt is drawn from Francis’ book entitled Narrative of a Private Soldier in the Volunteer Army of the United States During a Period Covered by the Great War of the Rebellion of 1861 which was published in 1879.   The 88th Illinois, also known as the Second  Board of Trade regiment, mustered into service September 4, 1862 at Chicago and first saw combat barely a month later at the Battle of Perryville. During the Stones River campaign, the regiment served in General Joshua Sill's brigade of Phil Sheridan's division along with the 36th Illinois, 21st Michigan, 24th Wisconsin, and the 4th Indiana Battery....

  D uring General William S. Rosecrans’ first month in command of what would become the Army of the Cumberland, he delighted his subordinates with his energy and drive in reorganizing and re-equipping his command. But as November dragged into December 1862, pressures from Washington began to mount that it was time for the army to move against Braxton Bragg’s army camped around Murfreesboro in middle Tennessee. Major General William Starke Rosecrans assumed command of the Army of Ohio from Don Carlos Buell on October 30, 1862 in Louisville, Kentucky. Rosecrans later wrote that when he arrived in Louisville, he "felt more like a constable bearing a writ for the ejection of a tenant than like a general on his way to relieve a brother officer." Buell had experienced great difficulties with the War Department during his tenure as commander, and it wasn't long before Rosecrans, too, was in the War Department's doghouse.  President Lincoln, already exasperated by previous ...

I t was June 1862 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The war was only a year old but the idyllic beauty of the region already had begun to be destroyed by the passage of the armies.       "I think that the Shenandoah Valley as splendid a place as men need set eyes on in this world," one Connecticut trooper wrote. "Large fruit trees heavily laden with green fruit, broad acres of green wheat that stands as high as a man’s shoulders already yellowing for the harvest. But what has the war done? The fields are stripped of fences to boil the soldiers’ coffee; cattle and horses are roving over the wheat and cornfields while some officer’s horse may be hitched to a favorite peach or pear tree gnawing the bark entirely off. These things look bad, but all pity is lost when we look to the right and see large trains of cars with engines burned to ashes or to the left towards Woodstock where two or three long railroad bridges lie entirely destroyed by fire. I think the governm...

O n the afternoon of March 8, 1862, the steam frigate U.S.S. Minnesota steamed into battle against a new Confederate ironclad near Hampton Roads, Virginia, but the battle for the 44-gun  Minnesota promptly went awry as one sailor recalled in a letter to his brother in Massachusetts.      " Before we could reach them, our ship stuck fast on the ground and we expected every moment that the  Merrimac  would run into us, and as she lay right ahead of us, we could not get our guns to bear on her," he related. "Still we gave them an iron pill occasionally from the pivot gun and from three guns on the gun deck which we moved forward to some spare ports so that we could make them bear on her. By this time, the Rebel steamer  Yorktown  and two others had come down to fight us. We set the  Yorktown  on fire once with a shell, but they extinguished it. Firing on both sides was kept up until 8 o’clock in the evening when it became so dark, we could...

A fter more than 40 days of siege, Adjutant Henry O. Dwight and his comrades in the 20th Ohio had become hardened veterans, but it came at a cost.       " I am entirely weaned from any longings after houses for shelter, soft beds, or good things to eat- from everything but home society," he wrote to relatives back in Massachusetts. "A cup of coffee, a cracker, and a piece of salt pork cooked or raw as circumstances may require have made me many a welcome meal and have wiped out all yearnings for little niceties to eat such as I would have at home. The only luxury to me would be to get into camp once more and fix up a few camp luxuries. Since the 19 th  of April, we have had no camp, no tents, and for more than a week, no chance to clean up and look decent. This hard life has told heavily on our men: nearly 200 have been left sick in different hospitals and besides that, we have lost 119 killed and wounded in the past two months so that we have but 350 men with u...

     T he Federal victory at Fort Pulaski in April 1862 is credited to the superiority of Federal artillery that was used to bludgeon the fort's masonry walls to fragments. Captain Quincy Gillmore, the chief engineering officer of the Federal commander General Thomas Sherman, arrayed a series of rifled batteries and heavy mortars along the north shore of Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia and on April 10th let loose with a devastating barrage. Private Oliver M. Mason of the 7th Connecticut was not only an eyewitness to the bombardment, but actively assisted with the operation of one of the huge 13-inch seacoast mortars as he describes in the letter below.       " One must need be a witness to judge of their destructive power," he wrote. "The mortars, of which there are 12, were manned by details from the 7 th  Connecticut Volunteers and did good execution throughout the bombardment which I think has given much credit to the regiment. A brisk fir...

     "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. And when he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?" ~ It's a Wonderful Life      I n the 1946 Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life , a suicidal small town banker named George Bailey is given a sneak peek into how life in his hometown of Bedford Falls would be changed for the worse without him. Guided through a dystopian nightmare by his guardian angel Clarence, George learns how impactful and meaningful his life has been, and how "each man's life touches so many other lives, and when he isn't around, he leaves an awful hole."       This idea for our 19th century ancestors was no mere fantasy, but a harsh reality as during the course of the Civil War, more than 620,000 Americans died, each of them leaving an "awful hole" in the lives of not only their family and friends, but within their broader communities at home and in the hearts of their c...

T o some, it appeared by early July 1862 that the war in the west was all but won. Federal forces had defeated Albert Sidney Johnston's army at Shiloh and a massive Union army now occupied portions of northern Mississippi, Alabama, and much of Tennessee. General Don Carlos Buell's army slowly marched towards Chattanooga while Grant's army lay poised to penetrate into Mississippi.     One of the major Union war objectives remained opening the Mississippi River to navigation. Much progress had been made since April when General Benjamin Butler's army, following the naval battle at Forts Jackson and St. Philip, occupied New Orleans and continued north, occupying Baton Rouge. Operating from Cairo, Illinois, Federal naval forces had won engagement after engagement and had seized control of the river as far south as Memphis. Vicksburg became the focal point for the Union navy which pushed towards the river bastion from both upstream and downstream. By late June, Federal gunbo...

M ost soldiers approached combat in the Civil War with a high degree of trepidation, and a soldier’s first time under fire remained one of the most vivid memories of their wartime experience. For Private Edwin Goodell of the 25 th Massachusetts, he first saw the elephant February 8, 1862, during the little remembered battle of Roanoke Island. It marked his first steps in the making of a veteran volunteer. “I wish you could have seen me when the battle was over,” he later wrote to a friend. “All mud and water up to my waist, my face completely blackened with powder and mud, clothes nearly torn off, and on the whole in a rather sorry plight. I expected to be sick after being knocked about for 43 hours in the rain and cold without anything to eat but a few hard crackers, but I am happily disappointed. I don’t know that I ever felt better or was ever in better spirits than I am today. I feel very thankful that I came off all right. I don’t know that I felt the first sensation of fear. I f...

A fter fighting in over a dozen engagements in the past two years as a member of the 99th Ohio Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel John Cummins was no stranger to life on the battlefield. But what he saw on the first day of the Battle of Nashville took his breath away.     " A fog concealed our movements early in the morning, but it soon cleared away," he wrote to his father a week later. "The sun shone brightly and revealed the fact that the troops were moving out of Nashville on every road- cavalry, infantry, and artillery. You could see long lines like great serpents dragging their slow length along in every direction. White troops and black troops, veterans, and new recruits, all moving to the carnival of death.  The inner and outer lines of breastworks were soon passed and artillery booming in our front soon informed us that the Rebels waited our coming and the contest was begun."      During the Nashville Campaign, the 99th Ohio was part of General Joseph Co...

S ergeant John D. Fiske of the 2 nd Massachusetts Light Artillery recalled that the action at the little-remembered Battle of Baton Rouge, Louisiana was intense but not as deadly as anticipated. “It is somewhat remarkable that we came off almost unscathed when the bullets were whistling around our heads like hail,” he wrote in a letter to his father. “We were in an open field on one side of the road and the Rebels were in the woods on the other side. It was quite foggy and with the fog and smoke we were obliged to hold our fire frequently. Once while we were enveloped in smoke, a whole regiment came out of the woods intending to make a charge upon our battery. The smoke cleared up just enough to show us the devils coming on their hands and knees at the extreme right of the battery where two of our guns were stationed. One of the guns is one to which I belong. They were scarcely 30 yards off. We immediately fired into them with both guns charged with canister which checked them. Anothe...