Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

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...

    The 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 cr...

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...

L ieutenant Samuel G. Boone of the 88 th Pennsylvania thought he had escaped capture at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, until he literally walked into the hands of the enemy. He had a split-second life or death decision to make.           “For an instant we both stood transfixed,” he recalled.   “Neither of us knew which was the victor and which was vanquished, but it required only about three seconds to decide that question as he was evidently prepared to fire when we met having his musket full cocked and at a ready. As it was, chances were all against me. My life was in his hands and I had the choice of being shot down or being captured.   I chose the latter as anyone else would have done under the circumstances.   Throwing up my right hand, I said excitedly, “You’ve got the best of me.”           Lieutenant Boone’s description of his capture comes from two sources, one being an a...

In part 2 of this series, Ira F. Collins of the 114th Illinois completes his account of the Battle of Brice's Crossroads by telling how he was wounded in the head during the retreat and describes his capture the following morning.  This uneven contest could not last long nor have but one result. We were soon convinced that to stay there was only to court death or capture. So, the guns of the battery were ordered spiked, but before it could be done, the Rebels were upon us and only two could be spiked. Some of the artillerymen were captured at their guns while others fell back with the infantry.   This occurred about the middle of the afternoon and the heat was intense. At the front and in the shade of the log house before mentioned was an old bench against the wall and I observed myself among the rest, as many as could sit on the bench waiting for their guns to cool and resting themselves fully exposed to the Rebel fire. Minie balls would strike those old, seasoned logs direct...

L ooking back on the events of Sturgis's campaign in northern Mississippi 25 years later, Ira F. Collins of the 114th Illinois was struck by the complete change of fortunes wrought upon the battlefield by incompetent generalship. And he laid it at the feet of General Sturgis's affinity with the bottle.       " No force ever marched forward with more confidence than did the one under General Sturgis on that bright June morning," he wrote. After double quicking for five miles to arrive on the battlefield, Collins noted that General Sturgis had taken over the Brice House at the crossroads as his headquarters. " I afterward saw it stated in a Mobile paper upon the authority of Mrs. Brice that Sturgis was drunk during the fight and indulged frequently during his brief stay. This being from a Rebel source might be somewhat exaggerated, yet there is no one who was in the battle of Guntown but believes that Sturgis was drunk and utterly unfit and incompetent to command d...

I was tempted to title this post "A Massachusetts Yankee in Uncle Billy's Army" as one rarely associates Massachusetts troops with the western theater. Most troops from the state of Massachusetts served in the eastern theater, although a few saw action in Louisiana in 1862 and quite a few more took part in General Nathaniel Banks' campaign against Port Hudson in the spring and summer of 1863. But Massachusetts men with Uncle Billy Sherman's army?       Well, there were two Massachusetts regiments along for the Atlanta campaign, both serving in Joseph Hooker's 20th Army Corps . The storied 2nd Massachusetts, veterans of fighting in the Shenandoah Valley, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, once had a captain within its ranks named Robert Gould Shaw who went on to immortality leading the 54th Massachusetts against Battery Wagner in Charleston Harbor.       The other regiment, the subject of today's post, was the 33rd Massachusetts. They, ...

W hen General Longstreet’s two divisions left Virginia for Georgia in September 1863, there was neither time nor transportation to send along the divisional ambulances and wagons. Those troops went into action shortly after their arrival at Chickamauga and as casualties mounted, the men were left on the field with little prospect of getting to field hospitals along Chickamauga Creek. Surgeon William H. Cunningham of the 19 th Alabama, his own brigade not yet engaged, pitched in to help. “Their surgeons were not well equipped with the necessary requirements and the wounded necessarily suffered in consequence,” Dr. Cunningham observed in a letter to his father written a week after the battle. “Everyone expressed sympathy for them, but you know a mere expression of sympathy is poor cheer, indeed. I thought to do the utmost in my feeble power for their assistance. I had only two ambulance wagons under my control, but these I used to the best advantage on Saturday evening and Saturday ni...

T he Regular Brigade of the Army of the Cumberland was barely a week old when it was called upon at Stones River to save the army's position along the Nashville Pike. All morning, the Confederates battered General Alexander McCook's and General George Thomas's five divisions northward, and by the early afternoon had bent the Union position back like a jackknife until now they stood poised to seize control of the Nashville Pike. General Thomas turned to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Shepherd and directed him to lead his brigade back into the cedars and buy time for the rest of the army to rally.      Captain Henry Haymond, commanding Co. E of the 3rd Battalion, 18th U.S., recalled the terror of that effort in a vivid letter written to his mother back home in Clarksburg, Virginia a week later. " The enemy bore down upon us in three or four lines, their front rank would fire and fall down and load, the rear rank firing over their heads, by this means they poured an incessant ...