Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

I n 1886, retired General Richard W. Johnson published a lengthy memoir of his services in the U.S. Army including a lengthy section on his history in the Civil War. However, the general skipped over entirely one of the most important events of his career during that war: his capture by General John H. Morgan’s command at Gallatin, Tennessee on August 21, 1862.           Fortunately, the pen of John Hubbell Carter who served in Co. D of the 2 nd Kentucky Cavalry (C.S.A.) fills in this void of the general’s memory with a speech he gave at the Confederate Associate Meeting of Kentucky in April 1898. This was turned into an article shared on page one of the May 26, 1899, edition of the Nelson County Record from Bardstown, Kentucky.

T he question has often been asked as to why General Don Carlos Buell behaved the way he did during the Battle of Perryville. In that battle, a third of Buell’s army engaged in a vicious fight with the forces under General Braxton Bragg and Buell, although only a few miles away, claimed to have scarcely heard the sounds of battle. Be that as it may, was there more to the story? Well, in a word, yes and it actually goes back to the day before the battle when the general was riding with his staff along the Springfield-Perryville road following the troops of General Charles Gilbert’s corps.  James Quinn of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a member of the Anderson Troop who served as a member of Buell's escort , was riding alongside Buell when Buell’s horse reared back and fell upon the general, incapacitating the army commander for days afterwards.        Quinn offered the following reminiscences  originally to the editors of the Washington Sun.  Quinn’s arti...

Colonel Harrison Hobart’s reminiscences of his capture at Chickamauga and subsequent imprisonment at Libby first appeared in the October 18, 1879, edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

I n the run-up to the Presidential election of 1872, a disabled Union veteran named Lyman B. Foster, formerly of the 26 th Ohio, wrote a letter to the Chicago Inter Ocean recalling a few tidbits of his wartime services buried within what amounted to a political letter. During the war, Foster was the “bullet magnet” of the 26 th Ohio as he was wounded on four separate occasions: Stones River, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw, and finally at Franklin where he was permanently disabled. I particularly enjoyed how he recalled the strong bonds of friendship that existed between his regiment and the 100 th Illinois. “The two regiments fought side by side in so many battles that it resulted in a strong attachment. Each sympathized with the other in its joys and sorrows,” Foster noted. “I have not forgotten how keenly the 26 th felt the loss of the brave colonel of the 100 th Illinois at Chickamauga [Colonel Frederick Bartleson]. I still hold in pleasant memory the manifestations of sympathy ...

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...