Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

  In the years after the Civil War, the veterans of the 38th Ohio gathered each September 1st to renew old ties and discuss their participation in the regiment's hardest fight of the war, the Battle of Jonesboro. The men believed that their charge at Jonesboro represented the regiment's finest hour and its highest loss in a single battle with 152 men killed or wounded. Sergeant Lee H. Rudisill of Co. H penned the following account of the charge at Jonesboro for the August 7, 1890 edition of the National Tribune. 

A fter a 430-mile, 24-day march from Tupelo, Mississippi to Chattanooga, Tennessee in the summer of 1862, Mississippi artillerist Benjamin W.L. “Leigh” Butt waxed eloquently on the beauty of the southern landscapes through which he passed. But Chattanooga and specifically Lookout Mountain topped them all.           “Here the scenery which presented itself to view was magnificent and sublime,” he wrote after climbing to the summit. “We were seated apparently in the center of an enormous circle rimmed with ranges of lofty hills, rising one above another until they blend with the distant horizon. Down below us was the scattered town of Chattanooga and at our feet flowed the Tennessee, making its way through the far-off mountains like the windings of a gigantic, glistening serpent.” The Mississippian appreciated Chattanooga’s historic importance. “In after days, this spot and its vicinity will be visited as classic ground. Already these mountains have re-echoed the booming of hostile c

  W ith the nation breathlessly watching as the U.S. Army fought the largest single battle in its history in the closing days of World War I, a 76-year-old Civil War veteran named John C. Newnam from Angola, Indiana penned an impassioned letter addressed to the young men “who are fighting for me in the biggest war that was ever fought in this world.”           “In the war of 1861, I was 18 years old, just growing up in the bloom of life. I was anxious to go to war. I felt it my duty to go. I felt as though I wasn’t excused more than any other young man to face gun powder, shot, and shell. I weighed 118 pounds, was well-muscled, and well-nerved up at that time, but best of all I had in me a heart that said this country must be saved if it costs my flesh and blood,” he wrote. John Newnam may be standing among these veterans of Co. H of the 44th Indiana Infantry. By the time this image was made in the spring of 1864 at Chattanooga, Tennessee, the regiment had fought in a dozen battles a