Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles

A ccording to Captain George Hooper of the 6th Alabama, the hardest fighting for his regiment at Seven Pines came near sunset on May 31, 1862. His regiment, part of General Daniel Harvey Hill's division, assaulted General Silas Casey's Federal division along the Williamsburg Stage Road early in the afternoon and after driving Casey's men back over a mile, ran into stiffening Federal resistance. The tides turned and it cost the 6th Alabama dearly.     " Near night we were ordered to retreat, the enemy having pressed entirely around our right and in effecting this retreat the 6 th  Alabama lost most of her men," stated Captain Hooper in a letter published in the Columbus Daily Sun . "The men at first slow about it, not liking the name of the thing, and they fell in heaps. All of the captains were killed or wounded except three and most of the other officers were shot down which created great confusion as the men could not find their companies.  Of my company, o...

W riting on the afternoon of May 31, 1862 while on picket on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, Joseph D. Bethune of the 2nd Georgia Infantry felt that events were building towards a climax in the fight for the Confederate capital. He could hear the guns marking the beginning of the Battle of Seven Pines, but "I  don’t think we will get into it just yet."     " Here we are, the whole army within five miles of Richmond waiting for the great fight which is daily expected," he wrote. "While I have been writing, the firing on our right has continued pretty heavy. A moment ago, a report came that the firing was caused by our men attacking a division of Federals who were hemmed in by the great rise in the Chickahominy River, it having rained all yesterday afternoon and night, thus cutting them off from reinforcements."        Joseph  Bethune rose to the rank of lieutenant by the end of the war. Afterwards, he took up the practice of law in Virginia ...

P inned down by a torrent of Confederate fire at Pickett’s Mill, the 78 th Pennsylvania split into two wings and fought independently, one portion staying on the field after the rest of the brigade retreated. The combat was close, fierce, and deadly. “We reserved our fire until they came within 15 yards of our line and we again opened a deadly fire on their advancing columns and cut them down like grass,” one soldier recalled. “Some of them had as many as five bullets through them. We repulsed them and drove them back, the left wing of our regiment following them up, leaving the right of our regiment in its old position. We advanced about 30 yards to an old fence but there we had to stop and could advance no further, nor could we fall back so we had to lay under cover of the fence. We were under the fire of 500 muskets and they would have cut us to pieces if we had tried to fall back.” This account of Pickett’s Mill, penned by a soldier of the 78 th Pennsylvania who signed his na...

A fter advancing into a pocket of Confederate fire at Pickett's Mill, Colonel Charles Manderson of the 19th Ohio quickly saw the hopeless position his regiment was in and decided to take decisive action. Salvation lay by moving forward, not by falling back as one of Manderson's men remembered.       " When Colonel Manderson saw that we lay under a heavy fire from the right and left and could not return it, he ordered the fence in our front to be carried out into the field and a breastwork made of the rails," he wrote. "An officer who is so well thought of as our colonel and upon whom depends the safety of the regiment need not give a command more than once, and so it was here that with gun in one hand and a rail in the other, the line advanced into the open field and put up the breastworks to lay behind. And it was here that the Rebels got some of our Lincoln pills."           J.B.’s riveting account of his regiment’s pa...

A s we contemplate the meaning of Memorial Day in 2024, I’m drawn back to the reality of the origins of Memorial Day 160 summers ago during the Civil War.           The letter I quote below is hardly unique nor extraordinary; it is a simple statement from a soldier’s commanding officer to his homefolk explaining the sad fate of their soldier boy. This particular soldier, Corporal Warren H. Connell, served in Co. H of the 29 th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and lost his life during the regiment’s attack on Dug Gap, Georgia on May 8, 1864, in one of the opening efforts of the Atlanta campaign. Warren was not quite 30 years old when he was killed in action; the one haunting detail being that when his body was recovered Lieutenant Thomas Nash wrote that Warren’s mother’s photo was in a bosom pin that he wore upon the battlefield. As Warren marched into the maelstrom of battle, he carried this reminder of his mother’s love closest to his heart. And...

A mong the more dramatic incidents of the Battle of Resaca was the capture of four Napoleons of Captain Max van den Corput’s Cherokee Light Artillery on the evening of May 15, 1864. The battery occupied a lunette on the far right of the Confederate line, just in advance of the main line to take advantage of the ground to their front. That afternoon, the 20 th Corps advanced and in a hand-to-hand fight, drove van den Corput’s men from their guns. But the supporting Confederate infantry of General John Brown’s Tennessee brigade laid such a hot fire on the position that the Federals took to ground, leaving the four abandoned guns as highly tempting prizes. The 5 th Ohio Infantry of Colonel Charles Candy’s brigade of General John Geary’s Second Division of the 20 th Corps actually snuck up to the battery after nightfall, attached ropes to the carriages of two of the guns, and dragged them back into Union lines. The 33 rd New Jersey from General Adolphus Buschbeck’s brigade and 5 th ...

H aving survived the being in the second wave of the Federal assault on Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, Private Joseph Spang of the 53 rd Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry vented his frustration and war-weariness in letters home to his family.  He could scarcely find words to describe the battle.      " I cannot tell you the truth of that awful fight," he wrote his parents. "The conflict was terrible – our regiment was the furthest in advance of any of our troops.  We sheltered ourselves behind some houses and were only 50 yards from the enemy’s rifle pits.  Our men were cut down like grass while the enemy could not be touched.  All we could see of them was their guns and sometimes a head.  The fight lasted all day – at dark we came back to town – our regiment stood three hours with fixed bayonets and not a man had a cartridge.  I expected every minute the enemy would charge on us but we stood there – no one came to reli...