Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

A fter Major John Clarke Thompson of the 44 th Mississippi lost his life on the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, he was remembered in many ways. His immediate commander Colonel J.H. Sharp called Thompson “fearless among the fearless” while General Patton Anderson recalled Thompson as a “man of education and position at home, of an age far beyond that prescribed by the laws of the land for involuntary service.” Thompson, born in 1805 in Georgia, had by 1860 moved near Hernando in DeSoto County, Mississippi where he had built up a substantial plantation and developed a reputation as an astute attorney. In the secession crisis that followed Abraham Lincoln’s election in November of that year, Thompson “did not hesitate to avow himself a secessionist” and following the outbreak of war, volunteered as a private soldier in Co. D of Blythe’s Mississippi regiment along with his eldest son Fleming. “When asked why he enlisted at his age (56), he replied that he had talked and voted f...

M onday December 29, 1862, was marked by a pair of Federal missteps that can be attributed to poor intelligence of the Confederate positions near Murfreesboro and an overeagerness in pursuit. The first of these two incidents occurred in the afternoon on the west side of the battlefield when the Anderson Troop dashed across Overall’s Creek right into the skirmish lines of the 10 th South Carolina of Colonel Arthur M. Manigault’s brigade. In a sharp little scrap , the Pennsylvanians took the worst of it, losing both of their majors (Frank Ward and Adolph Rosengarten), the net result being that McCook’s wing went into camp on the west bank of Overall’s Creek, not quite having achieved connection with the rest of Rosecrans’ army.           The second misstep occurred on the eastern side of the battlefield and proved a more serious engagement. It occurred at what is today known as Harker’s Crossing, a ford on Stones River located near what is n...

S unday December 28, 1862, found Rosecrans’ army spread out across middle Tennessee. Crittenden’s corps and Negley’s division of Thomas’s corps held positions along the north bank of Stewart’s Creek near Nashville Pike while the three divisions of General Alexander McCook’s wing lay in camps near Triune. Rosecrans directed that the bulk of the army remain in camp for the day to observe the Sabbath, however all was not quiet within the army.           The key question that Rosecrans and his staff grappled with was determining what direction Hardee’s corps had marched on the 27 th . Had they marched east to Murfreesboro, or south to Shelbyville? “If he had retired to Shelbyville, it indicated the withdrawal of Bragg’s army from Murfreesboro,” William D. Bickham of Rosecrans’ staff wrote. “If he had merely fallen back to Murfreesboro, it justified the conclusion that the enemy had determined to meet us in a general engagement in that vicinity....

O n the evening of December 27, 1862, the Federal camps near Triune, Tennessee buzzed with talk of a hand-to-hand fight the men of the Anderson Troop witnessed that morning. In modern wrestling parlance, the two men engaged in what is called a slobberknocker, a particularly violent physical confrontation. The epic fight between Major Adolph Rosengarten of the Anderson Troop and Corporal Joel T. McBride of the 45 th Mississippi meets that definition in spades.       The Federal army was pushing south from Nashville and after taking Knob Gap in a sharp fight the day before, the forces of General Alexander McCook's Right Wing, led by the Anderson Troop (also known as the 15th Pennsylvania) engaged in a running fight with the troopers of John Wharton's cavalry brigade and skirmishers from General S.A.M. Wood's brigade, among them the 45th Mississippi. It was two ridges north of Wilson Branch in Triune along was is now Tennessee Highway 41A where Rosengarten and McBride ...

E xpectations within the Union army were that the fight to secure Corinth, Mississippi in the days after Shiloh would be the biggest of the war. To be sure, General Henry W. Halleck had gathered a massive army to accomplish the task and by cautious advances had closed to within arm’s reach of the city by the end of May. Outnumbered more than two-to-one, the Confederate commander General Pierre G.T. Beauregard elected to abandon Corinth for a position further south, employing a ruse to convince the Union army that he was being reinforced to cover his retreat. Corporal Maurice Williams of the 36 th Indiana was with Halleck’s troops and among the troops on the front lines. On the morning of May 30 th , he recorded in his diary what he saw. “The enemy was very busy all night and we could plainly hear them giving commands and moving about,” he wrote. “Shortly after daylight, we heard the car whistle and then the train moved off southward and soon afterwards a volume of thick dark smoke c...

T he war was over. But for the soldiers of the 189 th Ohio stationed in Brownsboro, Alabama, the dull routine of army duty continued day after endless day. The men just wanted to go home.           “While waiting for final orders, drill and discipline are still maintained in their pristine rigor,” one soldier noted. “Private Jacks can’t understand why he is required to carry his rifle eight hours out of 24 on guard when he is to go home soon, while all the privates and officers in the alphabet swear worse than the old army at Flanders did at drilling as a battalion three hours on some hot afternoon. If you want a hornet’s nest, just blow the assembly about 3 o’clock!”           It was a long period of watchful waiting. “The young and old secesh are quietly waiting for the blue coats to leave,” he continued. “Then they intend to ignore the proclamation of freedom and gobble up all the Negroes a...

The author of this article, name unknown, served as a private in General George G. Dibrell’s cavalry command which had charge of the Confederate government’s archives during the final days of the Confederacy. He recounted those disheartening final days in an article originally published in the Chicago Tribune in 1892.

I n October 1891, Kemp H. Higginbotham, formerly a private in the 44 th Mississippi, traveled to St. Louis, Missouri to fulfill a promise made nearly 30 years before on the Chickamauga battlefield. During the battle, Higginbotham captured the colors of the 2 nd Missouri Volunteer Infantry during the hellish fighting near Lytle’s Hill on September 20, 1863. He promised the color bearer that he would return the flag when he could. And now nearly 30 years later, he decided it was finally time to return the flag.           The 2 nd Missouri enjoyed a storied history with the Army of the Cumberland. Raised from the German community of St. Louis in the early days of the war, the 2 nd Missouri saw action at Pea Ridge before transferring east of the Mississippi where it fought at Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and beyond. The regiment was uniquely armed with .69 caliber French rifles with distinctive sword bayonets and were considered o...

T he Battle of Mill Springs, fought January 19, 1862, had a number of names at the time it was fought including Fishing Creek, Logan’s Crossroads, and Somerset. Whatever one called it, the battle proved to be the first major Federal victory in the western theater. In three hours of hard fighting in a driving rain, General George Thomas’s command held off repeated attacks by General George B. Crittenden’s Confederates and drove them from the field, killing General Felix Zollicoffer in the process. The frustrated Rebels, mostly armed with flintlock muskets that stubbornly refused to fire in the drizzle, fell back to their camp at Beech Grove on the north side of the Cumberland River with Thomas’s men in hot pursuit. Thomas set up for a siege but in the overnight hours, Crittenden evacuated his men aboard a single steamer called the Noble Ellis to the south side of the river then set out on an 80-mile march to Gainesboro, Tennessee. “The retreat was even more disastrous to the Confed...

C olonel Allen Buckner of Illinois was accorded the nickname of “The Fighting Parson” for his key role in driving home the successful attack of the Union army at Missionary Ridge. A former Methodist minister in Illinois, he led his 79 th Illinois into action at Franklin a battle-scarred veteran. Buckner had fought at Pea Ridge with the 25 th Illinois, and led the 79 th Illinois through Stones River, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. He had just returned to the regiment having been severely wounded months before at the Battle of Rocky Face Ridge at the outset of the Atlanta campaign. But Franklin proved “the most terrific battle I ever saw,” Colonel Buckner later wrote. His regiment, assigned to Colonel Joseph Conrad’s brigade of General George Wagner’s Second Division of the 4 th Army Corps, was in the outer line of Union works on the afternoon of November 30, 1864, a position Buckner stated that his regiment should never have been placed. “We had hard fighting before, but now t...

    T he Battle of Stones River, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, has suffered from a lack of battlefield integrity which has hampered efforts to properly interpret the engagement. To be sure, the National Battlefield today encompasses less than 700 acres of a field which stretched more than three miles in length. The whole of the ground fought over by the Federal Right Wing and men from Hardee’s and Polk’s Corps on the morning of December 31, 1862, has been overrun with highways, rampant development, and has been thought all but lost. Gone forever. Until now. The American Battlefield Trust is currently engaged in a campaign to secure 32 acres of core battlefield land located to the east of Gresham Lane just north of its intersection with Tennessee 96, which during the battle was the Franklin road. As shown on the map below, it is a tract surrounded by homes and businesses, but it presents a wonderful (and unique) opportunity to preserve a small portion of this c...

I n the general reorganization of the Army of the Cumberland after Chickamauga, the 69th Ohio found themselves assigned to a new brigade under the command of Colonel Marshall F. Moore along with their old brigade mates the 19th Illinois, and 11th Michigan, and with the survivors of the army's Regular Brigade which had been decimated at Chickamauga. The men had their opportunity to avenge Chickamauga on the afternoon of November 25, 1863 outside of Chattanooga. The Confederate line lay ahead of them atop Missionary Ridge. Captain Alexander Mahood of the 69th Ohio described the charge thus:      " We crossed the open space without a casualty occurring and piled into the deserted rifle pits as the Rebs fled pell-mell," he wrote. "After gaining breath one or two minutes we raised and went at the second line with a cheer, which the Rebs vacated for us, or threw down their arms and cuddled snugly down at the bottom. It was deucedly hot here and the way up and at the hill w...

W ith the Atlanta campaign well into its fourth month and his patience well-nigh exhausted, General William T. Sherman dispatched General Judson Kilpatrick’s cavalry division south from its camps at Sandtown with one simple mission: break the Macon & Western Railroad that kept Atlanta armed and provisioned.   Previous cavalry raids had failed to accomplish this objective, and Sherman thought that under the command of a hard-riding commander like Kilpatrick, perhaps the deed could be done. But by the evening of August 20 th , General Kilpatrick's bold raid was on the cusp of turning into a first-rate debacle. His command had struck the railroad at Jonesboro and worked their way south while tearing up the track but ran into serious difficulties at Lovejoy Station.  Surrounded on all sides by veteran Rebel infantry and troopers, Kilpatrick’s division was trapped. Kilpatrick opted to use blunt force, forming his expedition into a solid column, and aiming to bull his way thro...

  W illiam Tecumseh Sherman was enjoying retired life in New York City when just before Christmas in 1889 he was presented with an article written by John Cockerill, a former drummer boy in the 24 th Ohio who was visiting his father Colonel Joseph Cockerill of the 70 th Ohio of Sherman’s division when the Battle of Shiloh began. Cockerill’s article, originally published in the New York Journalist and later featured in the January 1893 issue of Blue & Gray Magazine, Sherman later pronounced as “the best war story ever written” and the truest account of Shiloh.           On New Year’s Day 1890, General Sherman composed the following letter to his friend Marshall P. Wilder thanking him for sending along Cockerill’s article and giving his own explanation of Shiloh. “This to me is straw already threshed for we have fought this battle on paper several times, a much more agreeable task than to fight with bullets,” he concluded. “When i...