Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

F ollowing his army’s victory at the Battle of Iuka, Mississippi on September 19, 1862, General William S. Rosecrans lavished praise on numerous regiments of the command for their steadfast fighting. One regiment, however, was called out: the 17 th Iowa Infantry.           Burt Axton, reporting for the Cincinnati Commercial on September 23 pointed out that “censure is cast upon the 48 th Indiana, 80 th Ohio, and 17 th Iowa for misconduct in action, but how far their fault is attributable to the incompetency or poltroonery of the officers remains to be investigated.” The subsequent investigation by Rosecrans’ staff absolved the 48 th Indiana of misconduct noting that regiment posted on the left of the Union line “held its ground until the brave Eddy fell and a whole brigade of Texans came in through a ravine on the little band and even then only yielded a hundred yards until relieved.” The 80 th Ohio was similarly absolved of blame. ...

I llinois gunner Thaddeus Hulaniski, writing his mother after the Battle of Hatchie Bridge, described the intense moment when he nearly lost his life. "The enemy knew the position of the bridge which we had to cross and kept up a perfect shower of shot, shell, and canister, together with the musketry and thunder of artillery- a scene awful and sublime,” he said. “All our forces were engaged here except two batteries. Here our gun axle was cracked, disabling the gun and a shot sent into our limber chest which contains ammunition. I was standing by the side of it, that being my position. The shot broke two shells inside but luckily did not explode otherwise I would not be here to write this letter.” Private Hulaniski’s description of the fight at Hatchie River/Davis Bridge first saw publication in the October 27, 1862, edition of the Daily Gate City published in Keokuk, Iowa.

Colonel Daniel McCook of the 52nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, "Colonel Dan" to his troops, fell at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia on June 27, 1864 while leading his brigade in a charge upon the Confederate works.  W hen on August 21, 1862, I joined Captain James Taylor Holmes company en route to Camp Dennison, Ohio, it was on the condition that 7 members already enrolled must be rejected by physical examination or join other companies. To explain to those who have grown up since the close of the war, as well as to refresh the memories of those we became identified and part of the 300,000 more of 1862, I will state that if a volunteer chosen to select his associates in an Ohio company or regiment there were qualifications other than patriotism precedent to being sworn into the army.           I recall one experience of my attending a war meeting in an old log Methodist meeting house, dimly lighted with tallow-dip candles held in place by tin r...

O n April 11, 1862, Federal forces under the command of Brigadier General Ormsby M. Mitchel captured Huntsville, Alabama in a surprise move upon the vital Memphis & Charleston Railroad. Troopers from the 4 th Ohio Cavalry galloped into town at dawn, quickly seizing the post office and railroad depot. Among the papers of the telegraph office, they discovered a dispatch from General P.G.T. Beauregard dated from two days before at Corinth, Mississippi. Upon receiving this dispatch, General Mitchel’s staff set to work deciphering the document. “It is a simple and easy cipher which required General Mitchel and his aides about 20 minutes to translate,” a reporter from the Cincinnati Gazette noted. But how did they actually crack the code? And why was this seemingly important document sitting on a desk in Huntsville? This article explores those questions. 

C orporal Henry Gage of the 96th Illinois recalled the dramatic moment on the morning of November 25, 1863 as the members of the 8th Kentucky raised their flag atop Lookout Mountain.      "Before daybreak, the brigade started to scale the wall and the 8 th  Kentucky of our brigade swung the first flag over the “spur” and old Whitaker was close behind to swing his hat. Boys yell some when they make a successful charge but that noise that rose from the side of that mountain that time was as artillery to small arms. The shout from our lines to Hooker’s men who crossed to help us and was caught up on the other side of the mountain and so died away in the distance. Now that we had the mountain, our regiment and the 8 th  Kentucky came up to hold it and the rest of the brigade went on. We did not lose many in the scrape," he noted.           The following letter, published in the December 19, 1863, edition of the Waukegan...

I n 1896, Illinois veteran John Wiesman visited Atlanta and wrote of his disappointment at the degradation of the battlefield and the "disgraceful" monument to his fallen army commander General James B. McPherson.      " In walking over the field, I found only one bullet but the natives have quite a stock of relics on hand and are disposing of them at a fair price. I was surprised to find nailed high up to a pine tree where General McPherson fell, a sign reading “Gen. John B. McPherson, killed July 22, ’64.” How or by whom such a blunder was made I cannot understand. One would suppose that anyone who was in the least familiar with the history of the late war and our generals, especially one so prominent as our beloved McPherson, would know it was James B. and not John B.  The monument erected where General McPherson is a disgrace to our government. It is a condemned cannon enclosed by a cast iron rail fence about the size of a hen coop. That is all that marks the sac...

C rippled by a lame foot, Lieutenant Benjamin Blandy of the 25th Ohio missed out of his regiment's fight on Chinn Ridge at Second Bull Run but watched the events unfold from the regimental hospital wagons.     " Our regiment was on the left flank and our brigade was ordered out to support a battery. Nearly all our forces were stationed away on its right. The enemy concentrated his entire force on the left (the weakest point) and hurled them against us like a thunderbolt. They marched up like mad men, not at a charge, but marched up in solid column without firing a shot. As fast as one regiment was mowed down like grass by the scythe, another stepped up in his place. I know that our brigade killed and wounded more than their own number, but the Rebels still advanced with their heads down and took the flag from the color sergeant of the 73 rd  Ohio. At such conduct, our boys became panic-stricken and fled," he wrote.          ...

O n the evening of February 4, 1862, Lieutenant Colonel Jasper Maltby of the 45 th Illinois gathered the commissioned officers of his regiment together to give them a pep talk. After more than two months of service at Camp Washburne, Camp Douglas, and Cairo, there was finally the prospect that the regiment would see action on the morrow. Ten miles south of them lay Fort Henry on the Tennessee River.           “He said that we were about to meet the enemy and he expected that everyone would do his whole duty,” recalled Second Lieutenant Henry H. Boyce of Co. I. “He also said that by placing our trust in the God of battles and our good guns we would surely conquer. We would assist in making the future history of our country and he wanted it to be such a history as our children should not be ashamed to read.”           Duly encouraged, the regiment marched out on February 6 th as they heard the ...

I n the days after the Federal victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, the western armies pushed south along the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, eventually taking over control of much of middle Tennessee. But in eastern Kentucky, Union forces were also on the move and their sights were on Cumberland Gap.           To that end, in early March 1862 General Samuel Carter directed a demonstration made at Big Creek Gap to draw Confederate forces away from Cumberland Gap and assigned the task to his brother, Colonel James Carter leading the 2 nd East Tennessee, along with a portion of the 49 th Indiana. The expedition across the mountains proved a trying affair for the troops as remembered by Lieutenant Colonel James Keigwin of the 49 th Indiana.           “After three days’ hard marching over muddy roads, we arrived at the foot of Little Cumberland Mountain late in the evening. An hour was allowe...

A fter spending a frigid winter in the mountains of western Virginia, the 32nd Ohio along with the army under the command of General Robert Milroy moved east towards the Shenandoah Valley and ended up clashing with Stonewall Jackson's forces at the Battle of McDowell on May 8, 1862. Sergeant Major Cyrus A. Stevens of the regiment recorded his impressions of that engagement in the following letter which  first appeared in the May 24, 1862, edition of the Zanesville Daily Courier .

T he Battle of Hartsville, Tennessee, fought December 7, 1862, proved an embarrassing defeat of General Rosecrans in the days leading up to the Stones River campaign. Among the participants in this engagement was Second Lieutenant Edward H. Green of Co. E of the 11 th Kentucky Cavalry. The cavalry did not play a prominent role in the battle but Green tried to rally the faltering 108 th Ohio Infantry before the command surrendered. Green numbered among the lucky ones who escaped from Hartsville but that action led to rumblings of cowardice that made their way into the press. The following lengthy account of Hartsville is essentially a defense of Green’s actions during the engagement. He must have been convincing as General Joseph Reynolds placed Green in charge of his escort shortly after Hartsville.           Lieutenant Green’s letter was featured on the first page of the February 5, 1863, edition of the Aurora Journal in which they sa...

L ooking back on the Battle of Camden, North Carolina, Captain J. Merrill Linn of the 51st Pennsylvania remembered the entire expedition that led to the engagement as a "week filled with anxiety, labor, danger, and death." The regiment had been marching for hours when suddenly a Confederate cannon opened fire on their column.       "Bang goes a cannon and a 6-lb round ball struck about 50 yards to the left of the road we were on and went bounding and rolling past," he wrote. "We halted. Then came another which struck in the midst of us in the road but hit no one. We were ordered to get over into the field to the right which we did and the regiment entered a wood. Meantime, one of our pieces was unlimbered and answered. The Rebels kept our range and followed is with round shot, shell, and canister. We turned to the left to get on their flank. We were ready to drop from exhaustion and many laid down as if they were dead."  Captain J. Merrill Linn's lette...

O n December 20, 1862, General Earl Van Dorn’s command surprised the Union garrison at Holly Springs, Mississippi and quickly seized this important depot of General U.S. Grant’s army. After rounding up the prisoners, the Confederates ransacked the town, liberating enough Yankee whiskey to get many of them “gloriously drunk.”           One drunken officer ordered a building set fire where the Federals had stored their ammunition. “The flames speedily communicated to the adjacent buildings and to add to the confusion, the magazine blew up sending the burning fragments into all parts of the city. I was standing on the pavement some hundred yards off when the explosion took place. The concussion was so great even at that distance, I was thrown from my feet and every door in the almost was thrown from the hinges. Windows, sash and all were shattered into fragments of pieces of timber weighing a hundred pounds were found four squares from the sce...

O n the night of February 14, 1862, Orderly Sergeant George Hull of the 13 th Missouri was getting ready to sleep beside his company fire when a captain from the 2 nd Iowa came into camp and made a “most touching appeal to us to aid him in the rescue of some of his wounded men, lying immediately under the enemy’s guns. I called for a dozen volunteers and our boys, although nearly used up by four days of hard work, promptly responded to the call.” “It was a moonlit night and we could see the enemy’s pickets whilst almost half a mile off. We passed up the steep hill on which the 2 nd Iowa had charged up to and over the enemy’s breastworks right into their midst. The hillside was covered with their dead and oh, how ghastly their pale faces looked as the moon shown upon them, but poor fellows, they were all dead. Those who were not able to crawl off had all bled to death. The scene I witnessed that night beneath the enemy’s entrenchments in the dim moonlight was awful. God grant I may...

G oing into action near Shiloh Church on the morning of April 6, 1862, Orderly Sergeant William McClanahan of the 17 th Illinois reveled that “we were now brought face to face with a foe more worthy of our steel than we had ever yet met. Now came the terrible storm of leaden rain but still we stood our ground. Here fell Frederick Thume and Ferdinand Olert of our company; a strange coincidence as they were the only Germans and the only old soldiers in the company yet they were the only ones in the company killed during the whole engagement.” The regiment would go on to fight at seven positions throughout the day, eventually retreating back to within a mile of Pittsburg Landing.           During the Battle of Shiloh, the 17 th Illinois was in the Third Brigade, First Division of the Army of the Tennessee. The regiment served alongside the 29 th Illinois, 43 rd Illinois, and 49 th Illinois , all four regiments under the command of Colonel...

I n the aftermath of the Federal victory at Fort Donelson, thousands of Confederate prisoners of war were sent north to camps in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Lieutenant Farley Bisett of the 74th Ohio was tasked with guarding the group of Confederate officers sent to Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio. " They were a hard-looking set. Some of them might be good looking men if they had clothes to dress themselves with, but they are very badly clothed. They all appear to think that if they get back, they will let the rebellion take its own course and have nothing to do with it," he noted. More importantly, he also took the names and regiments of quite a few of these officers and recorded them for posterity.            Lieutenant Bisett’s letter first appeared in the March 4, 1862, edition of the Zanesville Daily Courier.

  Book signing event for Hell by the Acre at Stones River National Battlefield in December 2024 Let’s take a moment to review 2025 on Dan Masters’ Civil War Chronicles. 2025 marked another busy year on the blog with 116 new posts. The year also saw the publication of two new books: Faces of Stones River and Echoes of Brice’s Crossroads . The blog passed the 1,000-post mark early in the year (at 1,071 now) and traffic has continued to show steady and (at times) remarkable growth. The blog’s focus remains centered on telling the story of the common soldier in the Civil War, North and South. I’m excited to share new discoveries with you. The process of research and study remains a treasured part of my day and I thank all of you for enjoying it along with me. To help ring in 2026, let’s revisit the top 20 posts of 2025:   Top 10 Cotton Burning on the Levee: A Civilian Witnesses the Federal Seizure of New Orleans   A Captured Sword and Lost Story of the Battle o...

S ent out on picket on the night of December 31, 1862, Private Ulysses Greene of the 64 th Ohio recorded the scenes that greeted him upon the moon-swept battlefield of Stones River. “By the pale light of the moon, we could see that every ditch and gulley was filled with mangled corpses of men who had that morning entered the fight in the pride of their strength and in the enjoyment of health. The field was covered with the debris of the fight- guns, swords, broken down gun carriages, and dismounted cannons, all in one promiscuous wreck and ruin. I could dwell longer on this dreadful scene but you are doubtless tired already of so long an epistle,” he wrote.           Private Greene’s missive first saw publication in the February 6, 1863, edition of the Bucyrus Journal . During the Stones River, the 64 th Ohio was part of Colonel Charles G. Harker’s brigade along with the 51 st Indiana, 73 rd Indiana, 13 th Michigan, 65 th Ohio, and ...