Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

S hortly after graduating from Hillsdale College in 1862, Francis Wayland Dunn enlisted with his older brother Newell in Co. A of the 64th Illinois Infantry, also known as Yates' Sharpshooters. Scarcely a month after he enlisted, Francis recorded his impressions of the regiment's fight during the Second Battle of Corinth on October 4, 1862.     " Our battalion was under fire only a short time, but of the 230 that went into the fight, 74 were either killed, wounded, or missing," he said in a letter to the editors of the Hillsdale Standard . " It is a horrible scene, a bloody battlefield covered with dead and wounded men. It seems like an exaggeration to talk of men being piled together in heaps, and quite often it is, yet the explosion of a shell or a charge of grape will make it literally true. Around a little earthwork five or six rods long raised for the protection of a little battery of three guns were 37 dead Rebels.  The firing lasted but a short time and th

W riting from a hospital bed in Washington, D.C. three weeks after his regiment’s fight at Turner’s Gap, John Costigan of the 6 th Wisconsin recalled “the affair was a mixed-up mess of confusion. We fought on the brow of a steep hill among rocks and logs and all sorts of obstructions. The enemy tried to flank us when Colonel [Edward S.] Bragg yelled to change front forward on the first company.” “I could hear the Rebel brigadier holler “Shoot low, prick the toenails of the damned Yankees!” The bullets flew like hail among us and sounded like bees swarming. The Rebels made me a present of three pieces of lead a little above the right knee. It tickled some, I assure you. I dug out one chunk with my jackknife the next day,” Costigan stated.           Costigan’s letter first appeared in the October 15, 1862, edition of the Daily Milwaukee News .

Stones River Stories J ames Urie McClenahan of Co. B, 15 th Ohio Infantry wrote the following journal account of the Stones River campaign. Left behind in Nashville with the baggage trains, McClenahan recalled that “during the battle no one was allowed to leave the city – might as well try to get out of the penitentiary. At the close of the first day’s fighting, stragglers came in large numbers into Nashville circulating all sorts of doleful rumors, and those who had friends especially were very anxious, asking the stragglers in order to justify their own cowardly actions had put a high coloring upon their reports.”           A few days later, orders came for McClenahan and the other teamsters to haul a load of provisions to the army at Murfreesboro which introduced him to the devastation wrought by the battle. “After passing eight miles from Nashville, the remainder of the way appeared one continued battlefield to Murfreesboro, fences destroyed, houses burned, wagons broken to piec