Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

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 artic...

  W hat does it take to be awarded 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 P...

  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. ...

“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’...

F ew regiments at Stones River suffered such high losses in their field commanders as the 24th Ohio. Colonel Frederick C. Jones and Major Henry Terry both were killed on December 31st and better than a quarter of the regiment went down killed or wounded. Two days later, acting colonel Enoch Weller was killed, which gave the command to Captain Armistead T.M. Cockerill, the fourth man to lead the regiment at the battle. This same devastating fire shredded the regiment's national colors, a deep source of regimental pride as the colors had been presented to them by their brigade mates the 6th Ohio Infantry in recognition of the 24th Ohio's marked gallantry at Shiloh eight months prior.      " Our color sergeant being wounded, the colors were taken by a corporal of the color guard who was shot dead; then they were seized by another of the color guard who hardly had them in his hands until he was wounded," remembered Sergeant William Ehranan of Co. B. "The next man tha...