Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

W riting from Sharpsburg, Maryland on September 18, 1867, the correspondent of the Summit County Beacon fairly hissed with derision at what he considered the botched dedication of the Antietam National Cemetery.           “The Antietam dedication was pronounced a grand failure, like everything else with which Andy’s Johnson’s name has been connected,” he offered. “Everything connected with the performance was in a jumble, there being no programme, no order, no police, no managers. For six hours that vast multitude swung around in the hot sun, patiently waiting for the coming cargo of human depravity from the city of Washington. Andy Johnson was the butt end of ridicule and jests all day long. I heard not a respectable word spoken of his accidental Excellency.”           This scathing article, written for a Republican newspaper that clearly was not in Johnson’s camp, paints a dim picture of the...

The 30th Ohio monument at Antietam is close to where Private Thaddeus Fleck was wounded three times during the fighting on the evening of September 17, 1862. The regiment suffered 80 casualties including 49 wounded.  T haddeus S. Fleck of Marysville, Ohio died on February 5, 1885, at the age of just 41. At the outbreak of the Rebellion, he was scarcely 18 years of age and was working as a carpenter when he enlisted as a private in Co. E of the 30 th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. “He participated with his regiment in all the campaigns and battles in which it was engaged until the Battle of Antietam, including Carnifex Ferry, Centreville, South Mountain, and many skirmishes,” his obituary noted. “At the Battle of Antietam, the regiment lost heavily. Fourteen balls from the enemy pierced their colors and two color sergeants were killed. Thaddeus was wounded at Antietam on September 17, 1862, in three different parts of his body. First the left hand, then in the face, and the last shot i...

T ouring the western edge of the Antietam battlefield in October 1884, George Alfred Townsend of the New York Tribune newspaper received a tour of Dunker Church from the local sexton. “The sexton woman, who has built a log house just by the Dunker Church, brought the key and opened the door,” he wrote. “Within is the pulpitless plainness of Dunker meetings, a long table for the preacher and three seats facing it. All of the furniture is of yellow pine planed smooth and the plain square room with one end door and one side door is hardly 30 feet square. ‘We come to the blood stains whenever we scrub,” said the woman.           “The Dunker Church is one of many in that section of the country. The Dunkers settled on the headwaters of Antietam Creek in Pennsylvania, where their chief place is Waynesboro, now one of the most growing towns in the Cumberland Valley and approaching Hagerstown in importance. This is 25 miles above the battlefield, wh...

L eft at the landing when his regiment (the 2 nd Iowa) went to the front, Private Daniel McWorkman had a front row seat to the gunboat attack at Fort Donelson and witnessed its grisly aftermath.           “As the boats drifted by me, I could see that they had it pretty hot,” he wrote in a letter to his wife. “Their decks were covered with splinters, the flag staff of one had been shot away. When they landed I went down to them. They had lost several men. One man had been torn to shreds and I saw them pick up pieces of flesh as big as my two hands and throw them into the river. One man had both arms shot off.”           McWorkman’s letter first saw publication in the February 28, 1862, edition of the Keosauqua Republican .

S hortly after mustering into service in June 1861, the men of the 23 rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry received their allotment of firearms. It was a mixed bag: Companies A and B, being the flank companies, received the highly prized Enfield rifles; two more companies received Springfield rifles; the balance received old flintlock muskets dating from the Revolutionary War that had been converted to percussion. The men of Company E flat out refused to accept them.           Despite pleadings from their company officers and threats from the colonel branding the company as mutineers and threatening to have them shot, the stalwart men of Co. E refused to take up these antique arms. Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Matthews and Major Rutherford B. Hayes, old college buddies from Kenyon, cooked up a shooting contest between the crack shots of Co. E armed with the antique muskets and six crack shots from Co. A armed with Enfields. "Of course, the muskets c...

C aptain John Atkinson of the 22 nd Michigan missed the Battle of Chickamauga by two days; it might have saved his life. Writing a week after the engagement, he informed the homefolks of the tragedy that had befallen his regiment on the second day of the battle atop Horseshoe Ridge and especially noted the devastation of the color guard.           “The color sergeant Philo G. Durkee was shot through the breast and face and fell dead the first round. Corporal Stansell of the color guard from Co. H grasped the colors but had scarcely raised them when a bullet passed through his head, killing him instantly. Corporal Vincent of Co. C lifted the colors and a moment after received a ball in the thigh, wounding him severely. He was carried to the rear. First Sergeant William F. Atkinson took the colors, handing them to Sergeant Kendell of Co. C who carried them the rest of the day and had them when the regiment went into the last charge,” he wrot...

A lthough the battle at Pea Ridge did not result in a victory for the Confederate Army of the West, First Lieutenant James P. Douglas of Good’s Texas Battery felt confident “we have taught the Federals a lesson they won’t forget soon.” Engaged at b oth Leetown on March 7 th and near Elkhorn Tavern the following day, Douglas and his battery experienced some of the hottest artillery fighting of the entire engagement. The artillery duel with the Federals on the morning of March 8 th he considered most impressive. “At sunrise, we opened on the enemy’s batteries to our front at a distance of 600 yards. Our fire was answered with great spirit and soon the roar became ceaseless and sublime. The six-piece battery to our left fired a few rounds and fell back. The one to our right fired slowly while the enemy with eight batteries poured a torrent of shot, shell, and canister upon our little band. Our boys manned the guns with coolness and great rapidity. Soon many of them were wounded and fi...

R eading Sergeant Thomas Organ’s letter after the seizure of Cumberland Gap in September 1863, one gets the sense that the Ohio sergeant felt a sense of deliverance from not only avoiding death in battle but from no longer being under the command of Colonel John F. DeCourcey.           “The colonel (little DeCourcey as the boys term him) was a foreigner by birth and having been educated in and the breathed the atmosphere of tyranny and oppression, they had become so perfectly instilled into his innermost being that it forms the predominant part of the man. He seemed never so happy himself unless those around him were miserable,” Organ complained. DeCourcey’s command of the brigade terminated once Cumberland Gap was secured. “Colonel DeCourcey had his feathers cut some for disrespectful language toward General [James] Shackelford and was sent back to his regiment. General Shackelford had attacked the Rebs on the Tennessee side of the Gap b...

C olonel Robert L. McCook of the 9 th Ohio Infantry was wounded in the right leg during the Battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky on January 19, 1862. Writing from a hospital bed at Camp Hamilton, Kentucky two days afterwards, one of his first tasks was to notify Gustavus Tafel back in Cincinnati that his brother Hugo had been killed in the Battle of Mill Springs. He also explained how he came to be wounded. “My horse received three wounds from shots: one ball passed through my overcoat and the fifth struck me in the leg. I received a severe wound in the leg below the knee. I hope the leg is but slightly injured. You will see from this that we were in the midst of a fiery shower of balls. Had I left the field immediately it would perhaps been better for me. I remained in the field, however, and pursued the enemy at the head of my brigade a distance of twelve miles, of which I was compelled to make three miles on foot in an ankle-deep morass,” McCook wrote.      ...

I n early August 1862, General George Morgan, commanding Federals forces holding Cumberland Gap, acquired intelligence indicative of increased Confederate activity in eastern Tennessee. To smoke out Confederate intentions, he dispatched a 1,500-man force under Colonel John Decourcey to march towards the Clinch River. DeCourcey’s men were in camp at Tazewell, Tennessee on the morning of August 6, 1862, when Kirby Smith’s army made their presence known and attacked the Federals. The resulting ‘Battle’ of Tazewell lasted through most of the day, eventually sent DeCourcey retreating to Cumberland Gap, and cost each side roughly 70 casualties.           Among the Confederate forces at Cumberland Gap were several regiments of Georgians; today’s blog post features detailed accounts from an unknown soldier in the 40 th Georgia, writing under the nom-de-plume of Stilesboro, likely named after a small farming community west of Cartersville in Bartow...

T he combat that marked the July 30, 1864, fighting at the Battle of the Crater was noteworthy in part because of its intensity culminating in a rare instance of hand-to-hand combat.       Recalling the moment when the Federal assault began to fall apart, one veteran of the 45th Pennsylvania said "B efore our boys were aware of it, a line of graybacks with fixed bayonets was upon us, the officers swinging their swords and calling out, “Surrender, you Yankee sons of b-!” They actually threw themselves upon our bayonets and a terrible hand to hand conflict commenced all along the line. Swords and pistols were used with good execution while personal encounters with the bayonet were frequent.  The Rebel officers, by their coolness and daring, did more execution with their pistols than the men who seemed to care but little whether they fired or not. As we were found more with the Negroes, the Rebels did not hesitate to butcher some of the prisoners before our eyes, e...

In the spring of 1885, the Omaha Bee newspaper in Nebraska ran a 12-part series of articles written by John T. Bell of the 2 nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry covering the entirety of his service with that regiment.       A resident of Omaha at the time of his enlistment, he joined the ranks of Co. C on December 2, 1861, at the tender age of 19. He would survive the war with the rank of second lieutenant and 20 years after his discharge penned these reminiscences. The following year, these articles were published in book form as Tramps and Triumphs of the 2 nd Iowa Infantry.        Bell’s reminiscences are simply superb, really giving the reader an intimate look at life in the ranks of the famous 2 nd Iowa. Three of his articles will be featured in this series; the first, covers the regiment’s baptism of fire at Fort Donelson in February 1862. Part 2 covers the regiment’s role at the Battle of Shiloh and the third covers the Second Battle of Corin...

I n the spring of 1885, the Omaha Bee newspaper in Nebraska ran a 12-part series of articles written by John T. Bell of the 2 nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry covering the entirety of his service with that regiment.       A resident of Omaha at the time of his enlistment, he joined the ranks of Co. C on December 2, 1861, at the tender age of 19. He would survive the war with the rank of second lieutenant and 20 years after his discharge penned these reminiscences. The following year, these articles were published in book form as Tramps and Triumphs of the 2 nd Iowa Infantry.        Bell’s reminiscences are simply superb, really giving the reader an intimate look at life in the ranks of the famous 2 nd Iowa. Three of his articles will be featured in this series; the first, covering the regiment’s baptism of fire at Fort Donelson in February 1862. This part, part 2, will cover the regiment’s role at the Battle of Shiloh and the third covers the Sec...

I n the spring of 1885, the Omaha Bee newspaper in Nebraska ran a 12-part series of articles written by John T. Bell of the 2 nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry covering the entirety of his service with that regiment.       A resident of Omaha at the time of his enlistment, he joined the ranks of Co. C on December 2, 1861, at the tender age of 19. He would survive the war with the rank of second lieutenant and 20 years after his discharge penned these reminiscences. The following year, these articles were published in book form as Tramps and Triumphs of the 2 nd Iowa Infantry.      Bell’s reminiscences are simply superb, really giving the reader an intimate look at life in the ranks of the famous 2 nd Iowa. Three of his articles will be featured in this series; the first, covers the regiment’s baptism of fire at Fort Donelson in February 1862. Part 2 will cover the regiment’s role at the Battle of Shiloh and the third covers the Second Battle of Corinth...

S hortly after the death of General James B. Steedman in 1883, the following article recounting an 1875 conversation between the general and one of his editors after the war surfaced in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. The topic of their conversation was General Steedman’s celebrated role in the Battle of Chickamauga. “I asked him for the story of Chickamauga where he won his stars and the soldier title of ‘Old Chickamauga,’ of which he was so proud,” the editor stated. “He told it as coolly as if it had been a dream to him.”

O ne attendee of the dedication ceremonies of the Gettysburg National Cemetery got it 100% wrong.  After hearing Edward Everett’s two-hour long oration, he was spellbound. “I will not attempt to describe the oration or the impression produced by its delivery,” he noted. “Every American should procure it- read it and preserve it for others to read. The oration was followed by a dedicatory speech by the President of the United States. The announcement of the President’s name was the occasion of prolonged and deafening applause.”  Speaking of the Gettysburg Address, our correspondent simply said, “His remarks were brief but appropriate and impressive.”  While Everett's speech is now barely remembered, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has come down as one of the greatest speeches in American political history.            This eyewitness report of the dedication ceremonies first appeared in the December 2, 1863, edition of the We...

L ieutenant Colonel J. Stoddard Johnston served for nearly a year on Braxton Bragg’s personal staff as a volunteer aide. Upon the passing of his former commander in 1876, Johnston took to the pages of his own newspaper the Kentucky Yeoman to share some insights into the character of a man remembered by many as the “most hated man of the Confederacy.”   “In his personal habits and conduct he was thoroughly temperate in both meat and drink, discarding the use of liquor in any form,” Johnston noted. “In person he was tall and spare, but of a lithe and sinewy frame and capable of enduring any amount of fatigue. Though in social converse he was peculiarly mild and agreeable in manner, a peculiar conformation of eyebrows which extended continuously from eye to eye and a cold, steel, gray eye which exhibited much of the white when animated gave him in his sterner moods or when aroused a very ferocious aspect, which made him a terror to all who incurred his displeasure.”   ...

T he military record of Lieutenant Colonel Hypolite Oladowski, the long serving chief of ordnance of the Army of Tennessee, totals more than 800 pages in length. Most of the file consists of correspondence between Oladowski and Josiah Gorgas in Richmond, or ordnance depot and arsenal commanders in the western Confederacy. Buried amongst the mundane business of supplying arms among supply shortages, battle losses, and the carelessness of the troops there are just a few reports giving broader details of what types of arms the Army of Tennessee carried throughout its storied career.           The following two reports, both dating from the spring of 1864 and predating the opening of the Atlanta campaign, list both the types of artillery utilized and the small arms carried by the infantry and cavalry. The reports do not call out arms by specific type but calibers are given by which we can make the following broad assumptions:

S erving as a corporal in the ranks of Co. E of the 6 th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Pulaski W. Fuller opened a lengthy correspondence with the Vermont Standard newspaper in March of 1862, determined to provide his kinfolk with a description of the war as it was being fought in the West. As the fighting drew to a close on the afternoon of April 7, 1862, Fuller observed that “we now began to realize how dreadful was the work in which we had been engaged. For miles the woods were strewn with wounded, the dying, and the dead. The Rebels fled so precipitately as to laves thousands of their wounded and dead on the field. Never before did I realize the wickedness of war. Here were no breastworks or fortifications of any kind. Men stood and deliberately shot each other down as they would the most common game.” Two of Corporal Fuller’s letters to the Vermont Standard describing Shiloh and its aftermath are reproduced below.

An unidentified Confederate holding a Mississippi rifle at the photographer's studio in Corinth, Mississippi. Mississippi rifles were a common arm of Johnston's army in mid-1863.  A fter serving on the staff of General William J. Hardee as chief ordnance officer for more than a year, in July 1863, Major James M. Kennard reported for duty in his home state of Mississippi (he was a native of Port Gibson), joining the staff of Lieutenant General Joseph E. Johnston as his chief ordnance officer. Writing from Morton, Mississippi on August 17, 1863, he crafted the following report detailing the arms utilized by the troops under Johnston’s command which provides some insights into the remarkable array of weaponry carried by this army at the midpoint of the war. The document, titled “Statement of Arms in Gen. J.E. Johnston’s Command, including those at Demopolis,” resides as page 60 of Major Kennard’s military file hosted by Fold3.   At Demopolis [Alabama] .69 caliber percussi...

B y the end of the Civil War, the 45 th Pennsylvania could point to a war record that marked them as one of the most traveled regiments in the U.S. Army. Organized at Camp Curtin near Harrisburg in October 1861, the regiment was assigned to first to duty on the South Carolina coast, fighting at James Island and Secessionville in June 1862. Transported north to join General John Pope’s Army of Virginia shortly thereafter, the regiment became part of the Army of the Potomac and fought at both South Mountain and Antietam in September and later at Fredericksburg in December.           The following spring, the 9 th Corps was dispatched to the western theater, first to Kentucky, and shortly thereafter to the Mississippi River to support Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg. Our correspondent, a soldier in Co. I labeling himself as “Young America,” picks up the story in mid-June 1863 at Memphis, Tennessee as the Pennsylvanians are about to depart...

.69 caliber "buck and ball" ammunition was the most common type carried by the troops of Hardee's Corps in the summer of 1862, comprising 77% of the long arms carried by the troops of Patton Anderson's Division, and roughly 61% of Wood's division. A s I have been gathering material for an upcoming study of the Kentucky Campaign of 1862, I was delighted to discover the following a pair of reports detailing the arms carried by the troops of General William J. Hardee's corps in the summer of 1862. The first of these reports concerns the arms carried by Brigadier General J. Patton Anderson's division. Assembled by Major James M. Kennard, chief of ordnance on the staff of Major General William J. Hardee, the ‘Consolidated Return of Arms of the 2 nd Division, Left Wing, Army of Mississippi’ details the weapons carried by each of the four brigades of the division. While it does not call out specific arms issues of each regiment (I would love to have that deta...

“I have learned that I am reported killed which has given me a great deal of uneasiness,” reported Captain James Archbald of the 132 nd Pennsylvania to a friend in Scranton after the Battle of Antietam. His regiment, thrust into action for the first time during the fighting near the Sunken Lane, lost heavily and what Archbald saw on the battlefield haunted his dreams that night.           “The adjutant and I lay close together but I could not sleep as I still heard the terrific cannonading or the whizzing of bullets through the corn, so affected was my imagination,” he continued. “In my sleep the battle was partially forgotten as I as so much exhausted. Still, I awoke several times to find I had been dreaming of that fearful struggle.”           Captain Archbald’s description of Antietam first saw publication in the October 4, 1862, edition of the Carbondale Advance .

A nchoring the center of the Union line at the Battle of Seven Pines lay the six guns of Battery A, 1st New York Light Artillery. One of the gunners recalled the destruction his battery caused when they opened on the advancing Confederate battle line with spherical case shot.       " Our spherical case shot are awful missiles, each of them consisting of a clotted mass of 76 musket balls with a heavy charge of powder in the center that is fired by fuse the same as a shell. The missile first acts as a solid shot, ploughing its way through masses of men and then exploding hurls forward a shower of musket balls that mow down the foe in heaps," he wrote.       This gritty and graphic letter, widely reproduced in the Northern press, appears from the June 13, 1862, edition of the Dayton Daily Journal of Ohio. The Journal stated that "the following extract is from a private letter to a gentleman in New York City from his nephew who is a member of Battery ...

Three-star collar insignia of a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army. About one in five of the men who achieved this rank were killed in battle, a casualty rate twice that of brigadiers in the Union army.  It was the summer of 1864. As the Confederate army under General Joseph E. Johnston retreats towards the outskirts of Atlanta, a command scramble ensued when it suspected among the officers of Brigadier General Zachariah Deas’ Alabama brigade that their commander was leaving the service. Deas’ brigade, consisting of the 19 th , 22 nd , 25 th , 39 th , and 50 th Alabama regiments, had seen service with the Army of Tennessee going back to the days before Shiloh. General Deas, who had raised the 22 nd Alabama at the outset of the war and armed it at his personal expense, was wounded at Shiloh and subsequently commissioned brigadier on December 13, 1862. Deas missed Murfreesboro due to illness, but led his brigade through Tullahoma, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and the i...

A s part of General Silas Casey's division of the IV Corps, the 85th New York took part in the opening actions of the Battle of Seven Pines on May 31, 1862. Corporal Ellicott R. Stillman of that regiment provides an eyewitness view to the hard fighting his division made that afternoon which was included in Wilbur Hinman’s Camp and Field: Sketches of Army Life Written by Those Who Followed the Flag, ’61-’65 published in 1892.

T he combat at Gaines Mill was reaching a crescendo on the evening of June 27, 1862, when Lieutenant James L. Wray received two disabling wounds which would end his wartime service with the 10 th Pennsylvania Reserves. The senior lieutenant leading his company had fallen leaving Way in command of Co. E “I sprang before the company and urged them to follow me and I think it was not a minute until a Rebel officer called at me to halt and fired at me with his revolver, hitting me in the left wrist. I had my Colt in my hand, leveled it at his breast and fired. He threw both hands over his head and fell to the ground, dead. Our lines were now not more than 15 paces apart and I was getting faint from the loss of blood and when we were ordered to charge bayonets, I was hit with a Minie ball in the left hip which sent me reeling round in a circle. Then I fell to the ground and was carried from the field in a blanket.” Lieutenant Wray’s account of the fighting at Mechanicsville and Gaines ...

C ompany F of the 77 th Pennsylvania had the unfortunate honor of being on the picket line tasked with defending the Federal right in the opening moments of the Battle of Stones River. The company, on the far left of General Kirk’s picket line, scarcely had time to fire three volleys before the onrushing Arkansans of Colonel Evander McNair’s brigade forced them to retreat.           After the battle, three enlisted men of Co. F wrote letters home to their families providing their perspectives on what they witnessed that morning. Included in their letters are accounts of McNair’s assault, the 77 th Pennsylvania counterattack on Douglas’s Texas Battery, and even a rare sighting of General Richard W. Johnson who ordered the men of the 77 th to “take a tree and die there or be taken prisoner.”           As I read the following accounts, I can imagine myself sitting around a campfire in Murfreesb...

A dvancing against Marye’s Heights on the afternoon of December 13, 1862, Private J. Archibald McCullough of the 126 th Pennsylvania recalled the moment General Humphreys ordered his regiment to charge the Confederate line. “We were formed in line of battle, as we supposed, to support our battery which was planted and doing good execution on the hill in front,” McCullough wrote. “Soon, however, old General Humphreys rode up to General Tyler, ordering him to charge the works in front and in the meantime an aide from General [Daniel] Butterfield came to General Humphreys saying the works should be carried at all hazards. General Humphreys took off his old hat and waving it said, “I’ll take it sir, without fail.” “We were immediately ordered to fix bayonets, then came the sound of “attention” from the bugle, the sound which we so much dislike to hear when tired and halted on a march. Soon, this was followed by the call of “forward” when old Humphrey as we call him rode to the front c...

R ecently while walking at Secor Metropark west of Toledo, my wife and I visited Wolfinger Cemetery which is inside the park boundaries. While walking through, we discovered a gravestone for Private Eliakim Munson of Co. F, 14 th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Intriguingly, it stated that he was killed in action September 19, 1863, during the Battle of Chickamauga. The 14 th Ohio suffered 245 casualties out of 460 engaged during Chickamauga including 35 killed. That said, it is unusual to find a gravestone in the North for a Federal soldier who was killed at Chickamauga. As the Army of the Cumberland was defeated during this fight, the dead were (by and large) left behind on the battlefield. So, was this stone a cenotaph erected by his family, or was Private Munson actually buried in Wolfinger Cemetery? Gravestone of Private Eliakim Munson of Co. F, 14th Ohio Volunteer Infantry at Wolfinger Cemetery in northwestern Lucas Co., Ohio Before answering that, let’s dig a little more into wha...

T his gritty account of the charge on December 29, 1862, at Chickasaw Bayou, was penned by an unknown soldier in the 13 th Illinois.  The 13 th Illinois was part of Brigadier General Frank P. Blair’s brigade, holding the right front of the brigade when they conducted their charge. The regiment lost 27 killed, 107 wounded, and 40 prisoners in the fight along with their colors. Sergeant Jesse Pierce of Co. H carried them into action and was knocked out by the concussion of a shell. He came to when the Confederates, believing him to be dead, rolled him over to liberate the flag “which they valued more than they did the sergeant,” the regimental historians of the 13 th noted.           The letter appeared in the May 1, 1863, edition of the Mercersburg Journal , published right about the time that General Grant launched his ultimately successful campaign to take Vicksburg.

N ear high noon on December 31, 1862, General William S. Rosecrans saw that a sacrifice needed to be made to buy time to reform the collapsing Federal army at the Battle of Stones River. He turned to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. Shepherd commanding the Regular Brigade.           An officer of the 18 th U.S. Infantry was within earshot of Rosey’s conversation with Colonel Shepherd. “The enemy had succeeded in massing his forces at our weak point and that a change of front of our own forces was necessary for the salvation of the entire army,” he wrote. “My first knowledge of this fact was derived from hearing the fact stated in an undertone by General Rosecrans to [Lt. Col. Oliver L.] Shepherd who happened to be within eight or ten feet from me at the time. [Rosecrans] stated that he had ordered two brigades of Rousseau’s division forward to hold the enemy in check as long as possible. But that unless we could hold them for 30 minutes withou...

I n May of 1862, General Stonewall Jackson's Valley army pushed the Federal forces under General Nathaniel Banks out of the Shenandoah Valley. It was a discouraging defeat that set off something of a panic in Washington, but Captain Andrew Clark of the 3rd Wisconsin felt certain that the troops were not to blame.        " There was something wrong somewhere in withdrawing so many troops from General Banks and leaving him with so small a force so far in the enemy’s country," Captain Clark wrote. "We were three months driving the Rebels from the valley and have lost all we gained and considerably more in three days, which makes it rather discouraging for us who have worked night and day. But we have one consolation: we have done our duty and cannot be blamed for the disaster."           Captain Clark’s missive describing the First Battle of Winchester and the subsequent retreat of General Banks army from the Shenandoa...

L ooking back on the Battle of Chickamauga, Lieutenant Colonel Ole Johnson of the 15th Wisconsin lamented to his brother that " there was great mismanagement somewhere during this battle is evident to everyone but to point where the blame rests may not be quite so easy. On Saturday, our brigade was hurried into the fight entirely unsupported on either flank and the result was that after desperate fighting and heavy losses we were driven back and then another brigade would be sent in in the same manner, and thus we were defeated in detail."      Continuing his story of what happened to his regiment on September 19th, he wrote, "W hen the 25 th   Illinois had passed to the rear, we became immediately engaged with the enemy and the line in our rear (after the 25 th   Illinois passed over them and probably thinking that they were the last of the our troops in front of them) immediately opened fire and we were thus placed between the fires of friends and foes, suffer...