Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

       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 re...

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 t...

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...

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 or 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...