Just a Forage Requisition

Buried within the Compiled Service Record for Captain Jannedens H. Wiggins, commanding Wiggins’ Arkansas Battery of the Army of Tennessee, I was delighted to find several copies of requisitions for forage that Captain Wiggins filled out to obtain a supply of food for his battery’s animals in November 1862. It was the first time I had seen one of these documents and while not by any means a “major find,” the document tells a greater story than is apparent at first glance as it opens the door to understanding the logistical requirements of keeping an army in the field.

In the early winter of 1862, the Army of Tennessee had upwards of 15,000 horses and mules in the army and the job of ensuring that these hard-working animals were fed proved a daunting task. Part of General Braxton Bragg's decision to place the army in and around Murfreesboro, Tennessee that winter had to do with the fact that the region had enjoyed a strong harvest, helped in part by the fact that both Federal and Confederate armies were busily engaged in the Kentucky campaign during harvest time. When the armies returned to the region in November 1862, both armies foraged heavily upon the countryside and clashed frequently over forage through the end of the year. 

          As for the form itself: it is document No. 32 (Voucher to Abstract G) Requisition for Forage for public horses, mules, and oxen (yes, the Army of Tennessee used oxen) in the service of Wiggins’ Battery (still called Roberts’ Battery after the original commander) for ten days commencing 14th of November 1862 and ending the 24th of November 1862.

          The requisition is dated November 13, 1862, at Stewartsboro, Tennessee; you won’t find Stewartsboro, also called Stewardsborough and a host of other iterations, on any modern map. But in 1862, it marked the crossing of the Nashville-Murfreesboro Pike over Stewart’s Creek a mile or so south of LaVergne, Tennessee. Why was Wiggins’ battery stationed at Stewartsboro? A couple of reasons, the primary one being that the battery was part of General Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry brigade which at that time was tasked with patrolling the front of Braxton Bragg’s newly named Army of Tennessee. Stewartsboro marked the location of one of Wheeler’s outposts, making it an important point between the Federal army encamped around Nashville and the Confederates at Murfreesboro.

          As to why the battery was attached to a cavalry brigade, it goes back to the formation of the battery in May of 1861. Originally called the Clark County Artillery, the battery was raised by Captain Franklin Roberts of Arkadelphia who enlisted 94 men from Clark County as well as a few from neighboring Hot Spring County to form a new artillery battery. The Arkansans enlisted in the Confederate service on July 15, 1861, at Little Rock and after shuffling around to various assignments on the Mississippi River, eventually joined General William J. Hardee’s command and saw action on the east side of the Mississippi for the rest of its existence. “The battery was equipped as horse artillery, a fully mounted and extremely mobile light battery tasked to accompany and support cavalry units,” wrote Bryan R. Howerton. In May 1862, Captain Roberts resigned his commission and Wiggins, then first lieutenant of the battery, became its commander and the battery would be known as Wiggins’ Arkansas Battery for the rest of the war.

The requisition for forage document signed by then First Lieutenant Jannedens Wiggins at Stewartsboro, Tennessee on November 13, 1862 called for 8,880 lbs of corn and 10,360 lbs of fodder to feed his battery's horses for the next ten days. 


          As is made clear in subsequent documents in Captain Wiggins’ file, the battery initially was equipped with four guns: two 6-pdr M1841 field guns and two 12-pdr M1841 howitzers. The forage requisition states that in mid-November 1862, the battery had 64 horses and 10 mules to haul the guns, caissons, limbers, battery forge, and wagons. To me, the most interesting part of the document was the daily allowance for each animal: 12 pounds of corn and 14 pounds of fodder. Other options on the form include barley, oats, and hay.

          That said, Captain Wiggins’ requisition for 10 days of forage amounted to 8,880 lbs of corn and 10,360 lbs of fodder. With those numbers, we can calculate that it required 26,640 pounds of corn per month and 31,080 lbs of fodder a month to keep Wiggins’ battery in the field. And this is just for a single battery. Assuming the 26 lbs per day is the standard allowance for the army’s animals, it is worth noting that the Army of Tennessee had 23 other batteries (24 in total with Wiggins Battery) on the rolls at the end of 1862, all of which we can assume had roughly the same number of horses and mules (we'll say 70 to keep the math simple) and hence the same forage requirements. The numbers required just to maintain the artillery in the field quickly become staggering:

24 batteries x 70 horses/mules each = 1,680 animals

26 lbs of corn/barely/oats/hay/fodder per day = 43,680 lbs per day or 1,310,400 lbs per month

          Note, this is just what is required to keep the artillery, the smallest branch of the army, fed. The army had thousands upon thousands more animals to feed during this time period including officers’ mounts, cavalry units, and the army’s transportation wagons, ambulances, etc., all of which required horses, mules, or oxen.

          To dive into this a bit more, how much forage was required to keep the animals of the Army of Tennessee in the field at this time? Prior to sending off General John H. Morgan’s 3,900-man cavalry division to Kentucky and General Forrest’s command of roughly 1,400 troopers to west Tennessee in the days before the Stones River campaign, the Army of Tennessee had approximately 10,000 cavalrymen in middle Tennessee. More importantly to this discussion those 10,000 cavalrymen also had 10,000 horses, which at 26 lbs of food per day per animal gives a figure of 260,000 lbs a day to feed the cavalry. Add this to the total from the artillery gives us 303,680 lbs per day or 9,110,400 lbs a month!

          To this total we can add in the officers’ horses (at least a thousand) and who knows how many more thousands for the army’s horse-drawn transport (we’ll estimate 3,000 which may be low or high given the Army of Tennessee’s long-standing struggles with securing adequate transport) and I’d estimate that Bragg’s army needed somewhere on the order of 12,000,000 lbs of sustenance for their animals each month.

          Let’s build upon this a little further, it begs the question of what was the standard army ration for soldiers in the field? I haven’t seen the Confederate ration specifically called out in the literature, but it was similar to the Federal government’s 1861 standard that provided each soldier on a monthly basis 22-1/2 lbs of pork (or 37-1/2 lbs of beef), 1/5 a barrel of flour, 7/100 a bushel of beans, 3 lbs of rice, 3 lbs of coffee, 4-1/2 lbs of sugar, 1/3 gallon of vinegar, 2/100 a bushel of salt, 13 lbs of potatoes, a half-pound of candles, and a little more than a pound of soap. If you extrapolate this out for an army of 40,000 men on a monthly basis, the standard ration called for 900,000 lbs of pork, (or 1,500,00 lbs of beef), 8,430 barrels of flour, 2,692 bushels of beans, 120,000 lbs of rice, 120,000 lbs of coffee, nearly 178,000 lbs of sugar, 12,000 gallons of vinegar, 750+ bushels of salt, a half million pounds of potatoes, etc.

          That said, the basic monthly ration for an army of 40,000 men weighed roughly 5,600,000 pounds. Add in the 12,000,000 lbs of food needed to maintain the animals (another 6,000 wagons full) and it appears that the army needed somewhere north of 17,000,000 lbs of food to sustain the army each month. How to move to massive pile of food? You had wagons or rail transport. A Civil War era wagon could carry at most 2,000 pounds, a railcar at most 30,000 pounds with a standard train length of around ten cars for a total freight capacity of roughly 300,000 pounds per train. Thence, the army required 18 fully loaded ten-car trains a month or 2,800 wagonloads a month just to feed the men of the army; add another 6,000 wagons full for the forage and remember, the Army of Tennessee had neither a robust railroad supply line nor ample wagons.

          With these volumes and requirements in mind, it quickly becomes evident why General Bragg felt compelled to disperse his army across middle Tennessee because the transport to move the required supplies was not available. Hence, logistical concerns helped guide tactical considerations of how the army was deployed in the field. And all this from just a simple forage requisition… 



Comments

Post a Comment

Most Popular Posts

Arming the Buckeyes: Longarms of the Ohio Infantry Regiments

Image
     A common question that comes up in conversation about Civil War Buckeye regiments is "What were they armed with?" We are fortunate in that the state of Ohio kept good records of how the regiments were armed when they went into service, this being especially true for those regiments which went into service in 1861 and 1862. The state adjutant general's reports for 1861 and 1862 have been heavily drawn upon to construct this article, as well as consultation with Phil Spaugy who has done extensive research on how Ohio's troops were armed during the war.      Buckeyes carried a fairly wide variety of weapons into the field, and the below article breaks this down into weapons of both domestic manufacture and imported arms. The early days of the war found the state of Ohio practically bereft of longarms; as an example, when the 1st and 2nd Ohio Volunteer Militia left the state in late April 1861, they left unarmed, being armed at Lancaster, Pennsylvania on their way to
Read more

Dressing the Rebels: How to Dye Butternut Jeans Cloth

Image
     In the early days of the Civil War,  the Southern states found themselves with an abundance of cotton but a shortage of cloth with which to make army uniforms. The trade in cloth prior to the war had largely been to send raw cotton or wool north to New England (or Great Britain) where it was converted into usable cloth; but now that trade was broken and the Southern states were thrown upon their own resources in their efforts to properly clothe the Confederate army.  This collection of Confederate enlisted men's frock coats and shell jackets gives some indication of the variety of shades of butternut worn during the war. All of them are shades of yellow brown, some heavier on the yellow and some heavier on the brown. The blue used around the collar or as rank insignia indicates that the soldier was in the infantry. Surviving Confederate uniforms are considered rather rare and command quite a healthy price in the collecting market. For an in-depth study of how Confederate jacke
Read more

Bullets for the Union: Manufacturing Small Arms Ammunition During the Civil War

Image
       Civil War bullets are perhaps the most common item collected from the era; the two armies expended bullets by the millions during the four years’ conflict and spent or deformed bullets of all shapes and sizes have made fascinating and affordable collectibles since the guns went silent in 1865.       I recently acquired a display piece featuring 35 different types of small arms ammunition used during the Civil War, including everything from a small .28 caliber ball up to a .69 caliber three-ring Minie and it triggered some questions: how did the Federal army obtain its small arms ammunition during the war? Where did the lead come from to make the bullets, and where and how was the ammunition manufactured? This post seeks to answer those questions. A typical .58 caliber 3-ring Minie bullet   “Whenever the blasts of war blow in the ears of men who trade in the implements of destruction, they are apt to experience more joy than the true warrior, for then comes the harvest of gain.
Read more

The Cannons are Now Silent: The Field of Death of Tupelo

Image
       The smoke of battle had drifted away from the battlefield at Tupelo, Mississippi on the hot afternoon of July 14, 1864, but the carnage of war lay spread across the open fields. “Scattered at intervals over the field of a few yards are dull gray blotches half shaded by grass,” an officer from the 7 th Minnesota Infantry recorded. “These are the Rebel dead. They have fought their last battle and lie generally in attitudes of rest; some of them look as if they had welcomed death. On the faces of two is imprinted a smile. One is a boy of 16 with delicate features, almost girlish in their beauty. His last gaze seems to have been directed toward his hand on the forefinger of which was a ring. A circle of purer white indicates its place; the ring was carried off as a trophy of the field.” The following account of the Battles of Tupelo and Old Town Creek was written by an unknown officer of the 7 th Minnesota Infantry, his account appearing in the August 5 th 1864 edition of the
Read more

The Vaunted Enfield Rifle Musket

Image
     The English-made Model 1853 .577 caliber Enfield Rifle Musket was widely regarded as the best infantry arm in the world at the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. Favorable international press describing its efficiency in the Crimean War and in suppressing the Indian rebellion led to the widespread desire of American infantrymen (both Federal and Confederate) to be armed with these accurate and well-made arms. The lock plate of this well-worn P1853 Enfield rifle musket produced in 1862 shows the typical markings of a British-made weapon that made it through the Federal blockade.  ( Army of Tennessee Relics ) Enfield-pattern weapons were imported into the states by the tens and hundreds of thousands during the war years; one estimate stated that the Federal government purchased 500,000 while the Confederates purchased another 400,000. The Confederate government dispatched Captain Caleb Huse to Europe in April 1861 to purchase weapons and Huse focused on securing all the Enfi
Read more

Straw Already Threshed: Sherman on Shiloh

Image
  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 in England some years ago I was gratified to liste
Read more

Federal Arms in the Stones River Campaign

Image
  T he following list, constructed after many years of research, lists unit by unit which type of weapons were carried by the Army of the Cumberland during the Stones River campaign. A number of sources were consulted including state ordnance reports, Federal quarterly ordnance reports (thank you Research Arsenal ), Ken Baumann’s Arming the Suckers, regimental histories and memoirs, captured ordnance reports, and consultation with knowledgeable experts in the field of firearms. Some of this information has been shared on the blog before in “ Rosy’s Heavy Metal: Artillery of the Army of the Cumberland ” or “ Shoulder Arms: How Sheridan’s and Davis’s Divisions Were Armed at Stones River ” but this is the first time the army as a whole has been presented. The overall conclusion I drew from looking at this data is that the Army of the Cumberland in December 1862 was an organization in the midst of transformation as far as arms. Many of the regiments still retained their original issue
Read more

Escape of Captain Henry H. Alban of the 21st Ohio Infantry

Image
Captain Henry H. Alban was among the dozen officers of the 21 st Ohio Volunteer Infantry who were captured on September 20, 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga. The regiment had held its position atop Snodgrass Hill against repeated Confederate assaults and now battered and without ammunition, with the darkness of evening enveloping the hill, the remainder of that gallant band found themselves at the mercy of the 54 th Virginia. A total of 12 officers and 121 enlisted men surrendered; the regiment’s colors were taken, and the men marched off the field into captivity. Captain Henry Harvey Alban, Co. F, 21st O.V.I. Captain Alban along with the rest went through a series of Confederate prison camps before arriving at Columbia, South Carolina in October 1864. Determined to make an escape, he watched for his chance and one night made his leap for freedom, successfully eluding the local camp guard and setting out along the railroad to head for the mountains of eastern Tennessee and
Read more

Knapsack Compression: Wilbur Hinman recalls the first step of becoming a veteran

Image
L ooking back on his experiences during the war, Captain Wilbur Hinman of the 65 th Ohio (perhaps best known as the author of Si Klegg and His Pard ) recalled that the first road along which his regiment marched was strewn “with debris. A pair of six-mule wagonloads might have been gathered of notions that had been flung aside by a thousand suffering “tenderfeet.” “The average young patriot started for the war with a wheelbarrow load of clothing, a bed quilt or two, books, photograph albums, toilet articles, and gimcracks of every sort,” he wrote. “Neither he nor the good homefolks had the slightest conception of the capacity of a knapsack, nor did they for a moment imagine that before the close of his first day upon the road every pound he carried would seem a hundred.” To the true mark of a veteran soldier was one who “learned to dispense with every unnecessary ounce of weight, and just in the ratio that he did this he increased his efficiency as a soldier. It was of the highest
Read more

Federal Arms in the Chickamauga Campaign

Image
T he ordnance returns of the Army of the Cumberland at the end of September 1863 show the results of a transformational year in weaponry. Since taking command of the army at the end of October 1862, General William S. Rosecrans had repeatedly pestered the War Department to supply his regiments with better firearms both to improve the command’s efficiency as well as expand its striking power. The results speak for themselves: for the infantrymen at the end of September 1863, 90% of them now carried Class I long arms (36,058 out of 39,959), 8.3% carried Class II arms, and a mere 1.5% carried Class III weapons. Most of the foreign-made weapons (except Enfields) were gone, and by and large the army had settled on a single common .58 caliber ammunition, although a few .54 caliber and .69 caliber weapons remained within the ranks. The English-made Enfield rifle musket was by far the most common arm, carried by 56% of the men while the second-most common arm was the .58 caliber M1861 Spring
Read more