Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

  T he arrival of General James Steedman's division atop Horseshoe Ridge on the afternoon of Sunday, September 20, 1863, in General Thomas' estimation, saved the Union army at Chickamauga. Few of the troops of the Reserve Corps had seen much combat, among them the subject of today's post the 115th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.       Raised in September 1862 from several counties in the center of the state, the regiment spent it first months in the service on rear area duty in Kentucky before joining the main army in February 1863. It saw its first action at Franklin on April 10, 1863, then participated in the Tullahoma campaign.       The Reserve Corps held open the vital road at Rossville on the first day of the battle before moving to the front the following day. As remembered by Frank Gates of Co. K, the regiment double quicked to the front and came under fire as soon as they arrived on the ridge. " The ball opened in dead earnest, the bullets from our own and the en

  A fter marching all night, the men of the 31st Ohio stacked arms near LaFayette Road on the morning of Saturday September 19, 1863 were a "sleepy, dusty bunch of boys" recalled Sergeant Samuel McNeil. " The boys were short of hardtack and judging by the appearance of their jaded horses, our 4 th  Michigan Battery must have been short of oats. General Thomas, erect and silent as ever, rode by. Perhaps our old hero was not so much to blame as the lamented Colonel Dan McCook for our going into the fight without the usual tin cup of coffee. Let that be as it may, there came the unwelcome order “Fall in!” As the regiment took arms we heard the first, but not the last, of the now historical Confederate brigade that Colonel McCook had found isolated on our side of the Chickamauga near Reed’s Bridge."           Sergeant McNeil’s account of the September 19, 1863 fighting at Chickamauga first saw publication in the April 14, 1887 edition of the National Tribune .

       Samuel Pearce Jennison was working as the state librarian of Minnesota in the spring of 1861 when the Civil War began. At the call to arms, he joined the 2nd Minnesota Volunteer Infantry and was commissioned as regimental adjutant reporting to Colonel Horatio P. Van Cleve. The regiment joined the Army of the Ohio in Kentucky in October 1861 and first smelled powder on January 19, 1862 at the Battle of Mill Springs.     After hurriedly being called into line that morning, the 2nd Minnesota marched to the front. " We got down about three quarters of a mile and formed in line of battle," the former librarian wrote. "While standing in that position, three cannon shots were fired over the line and struck a few rods from us. That showed the fellows were in earnest, previous to which I supposed it was only a feint to alarm us." The Minnesotans approached the line being held by the 10th Indiana and 4th Kentucky intended to relieve them, but when those two regiments f

J ohn Hetfield of the 129th Indiana recorded the horrors of the Franklin battlefield on the night of November 30, 1864. " They were killed in such great numbers that acres of ground before our works were covered with the dead and wounded," he wrote. "They were piled in the ditch on some parts of the field four to six men deep, the dead on the living and the living on the dead. These poor misguided wretches in their misery called and pleaded for help, for mercy, for water, but no helping hand could be found for they still charged and recharged our works, running over their dead and wounded. We could not help them but attended to the living Rebs yet before us giving hot lead and cold steel until 12 o’clock at night."     The 129th Indiana was part of Colonel Orlando Moore's Second Brigade of General Thomas Ruger's Second Division of the 23rd Army Corps. The Hoosiers served alongside the 107th Illinois , 80th Indiana , 23rd Michigan, 111th Ohio , and 118th Ohio

I t was three weeks after the Battle of Shiloh before Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Dodge of the 30th Indiana had time to give his wife a hurried account of the engagement. He struggled to find the words to describe what he saw. " You can have no idea of the awful slaughter that took place," he wrote.  "There were actually places where you could walk (had you been so inclined) 30 rods straight ahead on the bodies of dead Rebels. In one place I saw them so thick one quite a large piece of ground that I could not ride through on account of my horse stepping on them.  I got off wonderfully: a Minie ball cut the hair off the back part of my head, another went through one of the men and struck me on the calf of my leg doing no damage further than making it feel as if somebody had thrown a stone and hit me. A buckshot went through my pants close to my knee." Colonel Dodge numbered among the lucky ones: the 30th Indiana lost 129 officers and men in the fight including Colon

 " The first we heard was a low, rumbling sound and in looking up that way we could see human beings, timber, dirt, etc. ascending into the air, the fort being only one-half mile from us and in plain sight. Immediately after the explosion, the artillery from one end of the line to the other began such a cannonading as has not been heard since the siege of Vicksburg." ~ Sergeant Samuel Ransom, 150th Pennsylvania     A t first light on the morning of July 30, 1864, soldiers from the 48th Pennsylvania lit the fuse to an enormous mine that the men had dug beneath a portion of the Confederate lines at Petersburg, Virginia. The resulting explosion blew a ghastly hole 170 feet long, 100 feet wide, and more than 30 feet deep, killing nearly 300 Confederate troops outright. The Federals planned to storm the breach with General James Ledlie's entire division and thus break the siege of Petersburg. But the attack bogged down and the men charged into the crater instead of around it,

  A fter three months of campaigning in the summer of 1864, John Myers of the 55th Illinois described how the men of both armies embarked on an informal truce after one of the bloodiest battles of the Atlanta campaign, Ezra Church, in late July 1864.         " The pickets have kept up a continual fire which almost amounted to a battle until last evening when it ceased, and they commenced trading coffee and sugar," he wrote. "This morning we find a few of our pickets missing. Having gone into the Rebel lines to trade they were retained as prisoners while some of their men have come in and given themselves up. As it is unsafe to be fired at, both sides agree to allow the truce to remain unbroken. The Rebels come out in plain view and box and wrestle, and our boys get upon the works and look at them. On one occasion today their artillery opened on us with all its fury when we were in plain sight, but they hurt no one and besides injuring our works somewhat they only showe

F or James Parsons of the 88th Illinois, the combat he experienced at Chickamauga on noon of September 20, 1863 ranked among the most ferocious and quickest of the war.       " We went out on the double quick for three-fourths of a mile with the smoke so thick that we could not see our file leader," he wrote to his family back in Massachusetts, "The order came “Company into line, forward,” then “into line of battle,” and all on the double quick and under a heavy fire from the enemy. We succeeded in driving the first line but as soon as they fell back there was another line and they drove us back in a hurry." His brigade commander William H. Lytle dead, the Federal line collapsed under the pressure and Parsons reported his regiment lost 77 casualties, including all three of his company's commissioned officers.       Parsons was the last of three brothers still serving in the Union army; his brother Willard had been killed at Second Winchester while serving with t

N ighttime operations proved far and few between during the Civil War, but Grant's offensive at Chattanooga in the fall of 1863 featured a pair of nighttime amphibious operations that involved making a lodgment on one bank of the other of the Tennessee River. The Brown's Ferry operation is perhaps better known, but the river crossing of the 15th Army Corps on the night of November 23-24 is well worth remembering.       William Reed of the 8th Missouri (the American Zouaves) was in the forefront of that effort as he recalls in this extraordinary letter detailing the operations around Tunnel Hill in those fateful days of late November 1863. " At 11 o’clock, we fell in line and marched to the boats and from 12-15 men were put in each boat," he wrote. "Two companies of our regiment were to be used as skirmishers under Major Kinly and those were the only ones that loaded guns; the remainder were instructed to use the bayonet if the Rebs disputed our landing. At 1 o’cl

W illiam Reed and his comrades of the 8th Missouri marched into camp north of Chattanooga on November 20, 1863 full of spirit and spoiling for a fight. " We got into camp three miles above town about noon having marched 330 miles since leaving Corinth," he wrote. "We were somewhat tired and worn down, but I never saw an army in better spirits than was ours."      In the fall of 1863, Union armies east and west were on the move with their sights set on Chattanooga. Following the defeat of William S. Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland at the Battle of Chickamauga, the War Department elected to send two corps from the Army of the Potomac to reinforce Chattanooga (see "The Crescent on the Move" ) but also dispatched four divisions from Grant's Army of the Tennessee as well. The story of the march of the Army of the Tennessee from their camps at Vicksburg to Chattanooga is not one that I've seen much written about, and it is with pleasure that I pres

Y ears before Gettysburg became nationally known, a young Oliver N. Worden passed through town while traveling. “This little town was then only noted for its Lutheran College and as the residence of Thaddeus Stevens, and all I remembered of it was its quiet and the politeness of a foreign resident who took some pains to gratify the request of a stranger lad in his lone journey,” he wrote. “Little did it seem probable that I should ever visit again or that so sequestered a spot would become the theater of one of the greatest, most memorable battles history has to record.”           Fast forward to November 1863 when Worden, now editor of the Union County Star and Lewisburg Chronicle newspaper, returned to the “little town” to participate in the dedication of the national cemetery. He spent time touring the battlefield before the dedication ceremony and left a remarkable account of who and what he saw during his visit to Gettysburg. The article saw publication on the first page of the

  W hat does it take a earn the Medal of Honor?           For Private William Reed of the 8 th Missouri Infantry, it took the courage to volunteer for a bold effort to storm the fortifications of Vicksburg on May 22, 1863. Three days before Reed had participated in the first effort to storm Vicksburg and found it an impossible task. He had no delusions that this effort would prove any easier. “We learned that 150 men of our division were wanted to constitute a forlorn hope, to move in advance of the main army with fixed bayonets and scale the walls,” he wrote. “A total of 14 men were required from our regiment and none but those that would volunteer. I considered my life no better than the others and was the fourth man to put down my name. They say as long as there is life, there is hope, but my prospect of every getting back safe was not very promising.” William Reed regularly sent letters back to his hometown newspaper in Pennsylvania, the Union County Star and Lewisburg Chronic

  J oseph Hinkle of the 30th Tennessee had scarcely arrived at Fort Donelson in early 1862 before the young infantryman came down with a case of the measles. He returned home, recovered, and arrived back at the fort just in time to participate in the battle against General Ulysses Grant’s army as Hinkle relays in the following letter. His company received orders to man the ten heavy guns that had been emplaced on the bluff defending the Cumberland River and here Hinkle begins his story of the Battle of Fort Donelson.

  I t is said that a picture can tell a thousand stories. Among the holdings of the Library of Congress is a remarkable image identified as Private Edward P. Savage of Co. G of the 100 th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Between the misshapen hat that looks as if it belonged on a scarecrow’s head to his shoddy sack coat and Confederate issue Gardner-patent canteen, Savage looks more like one of Sherman’s bummers tricked out for a day of foraging during the March to the Sea than one of Rosecrans’ fresh-faced recruits in the fall of 1862. But there’s a deeper story to the image that the Library of Congress only briefly alludes to in the description. "Private Edward P. Savage of Co. G, 100th Illinois Infantry Regiment in Confederate jacket with Gardner patent canteen and haversack. Photograph shows identified soldier in dilapidated condition, who had recently been paroled by Confederates."  Private Edward P. Savage of the 100th Illinois poses in his butternut "finery"

I n the aftermath of the retreat from Murfreesboro, Sergeant Isaac Wark of the 1 st Louisiana Regulars grew discouraged at the misfortunes of the Army of Tennessee. Despite an apparent battlefield victory at Stones River on December 31 st , Braxton Bragg and his army evacuated Murfreesboro on the night of January 3 rd and took up their line of march to new positions south of the Duck River, seemingly handing a victory over to General William S. Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland. The Louisianan lost roughly half of his 255 comrades who went into the fight at Stones River and Wark felt they had precious little to show for the losses sustained. “I don’t know what they intend to do with us,” he commented to a friend a week later. “We are scarcely a hundred men strong and there don’t seem to be much of a prospect of filling the regiment up. I hope General Bragg will break us up and put us into some other regiment so that we might get clear of these officers. I never had a very go

“I was the last of the color guards to fall. Captain Nat Gooch told me that the color bearer and the color guard had all fallen so close together that he could have covered us all with the flag.”             D uring the Civil War, the Confederate army did not have individual medals for valor such as the Medal of Honor, but after the engagement at Stones River, companies were allowed to vote on which members of their company deserved special recognition for heroism demonstrated on that field. Corporal William L. McKay of Co. I of the 18 th Tennessee was accorded that honor and recommended for promotion “for his superior gallantry on the battlefield of Murfreesboro on the 2 nd day of January 1863.” It was small recompense for his horrible experiences of being wounded during Breckinridge's assault that afternoon then lying unattended for two days as he relays in the following memoir. He eventually ended up in a Federal hospital camp. “Eight surgeons made the rounds of the camp M

“Their artillery opened upon us a most terrific fire and our forces melted away like night shadows before the break of morning, but they struggled on in face of the fiery sleet, like gods for their altars.”   ~ Captain Tod Carter on Breckinridge’s assault on January 2, 1863   Captain Theodorick “Tod” Carter of the 20 th Tennessee is today remembered by most Civil War buffs for being mortally wounded within sight of his family’s home during the Battle of Franklin on November 30, 1864. But during the war, Carter gained some notoriety as a well-regarded and regular newspaper correspondent with the Chattanooga Daily Rebel. Writing under the penname Mint Julep, Carter’s literary sense and penchant for detail make his writings some of the most illuminating from the Army of Tennessee. One of his earliest productions is the following account of the Battle of Stones River which the Rebel published on the front page of their January 15, 1863 issue. As part of General William Preston’s brigade