Battery Disbanded
FEW, YESTERDAY OR TODAY, HAVE EVER HEARD OF THE 13TH INDEPENDENT Battery, Ohio Light Artillery, organized and mustered into the service of the Union Army at Camp Dennison, Ohio, on December 20, 1861, one year to the day after South Carolina seceded from the Union. Few at any time since the battery’s first and only appearance in battle have heard of it because its furious division commander, Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut, disbanded the unit, scattered its men, gave away its guns, and ordered its officers home, accusing all of cowardly performance in battle…even if it was their first combat experience.
By Hurlbut’s angry account, the battery personnel (“ignorant of duty and drill”) set up their guns on Sunday, April 6, 1862, and then—“A single shot from the enemy’s batteries struck in [Captain John B.] Myers’ 13th Ohio Battery, when officers, and men, with a common impulse of disgraceful cowardice, abandoned their entire battery, horses, caissons, and guns, and fled, and I saw no more of them until Tuesday.”
The facts, as related by others, may have been somewhat less stinging. For instance, Thomas Jeffrey, a young enlisted man in the battery, later wrote that he and his companions spent most of the time after their unit’s formation in December 1861 in marching drills, because only one practice cannon was available at their camp for the use of several artillery batteries.
On March 1, 1862, the battery at last received “guns and horses.” Just four days later, the battery was ordered to the front. The front would be Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River; the battle awaiting Jeffrey and his comrades was Shiloh.
How did they get there from Ohio? They “marched to Cincinnati and by railroad to St. Louis, then by steamboat down to Cairo and up the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers to Pittsburg Landing.”
The entire trip took nearly a month. Leaving on March 5, the 13th Ohio Battery arrived just six days before the fighting erupted on Sunday, April 6, near the Shiloh meetinghouse. “From the time of receiving their guns and horses to their arrival at Pittsburg,” wrote Jeffrey later, “they had not had their horses hitched up more than a half dozen times.”
On that “terrible first day,” as he later called it, Jeffrey’s artillery battery was “prompt to respond” as the fighting began, but had to wait for an hour or more in camp for orders. They came at last, carried by an aide to General Hurlbut: Move up to the front.
“After going forward a mile or more the Captain was ordered to place his battery in position in a narrow belt of timber to the right of an open field,” wrote Jeffrey years later. Myers objected, saying he wanted to place his guns in the open field. “The staff officer peremptorily ordered him to place it in the timber.”
It may be, too, as other accounts have it, that the inexperienced Myers mistakenly held back when his supporting infantry, four regiments under Brigadier General Jacob Lauman, dashed ahead. General Hurlbut later accused Myers of holding back, “either from ignorance or some other cause.”
In the lines opposite, meanwhile, a very proficient artilleryman was preparing his own guns to support a Confederate charge against Lauman’s position. This was Captain Felix H. Robertson, commander of an Alabama battery and a West Point graduate who had gone with the South. He had the 13th Ohio Battery in his sights.
As Jeffrey tells it: “As they [his battery] undertook to obey the order [to go into the trees], the enemy opened with both infantry and artillery which resulted in their becoming hopelessly entangled among the trees and logs, the horses shot down, the men in disorder. So complete was the destruction that but two of the team with one gun and its caisson escaped from the general disaster.”
Said a friendly onlooker, Union Lieutenant Cuthbert W. Laing of the nearby 2nd Michigan Battery: “They had just got unlimbered when one of their caissons was shivered to pieces, and the horses on one of the guns took fright and ran through our lines. All then left the battery without firing a shot.”
Other Union artillerymen, it seems, ran forward, cut loose the surviving horses, and spiked the guns left behind by the 13th Battery, which suffered one man killed and eight wounded.
The day wore on, with at least four Confederate assaults against Lauman’s “Hornet’s Nest” sector in the Federal line, which was gradually pushed back— but at horrendous cost to the attacking Rebels. Said an Indiana officer: “The advance was made up to within some 10 yards of my line and the slaughter among the enemy in its front was terrible.” General Lauman recalled, as did U. S. Grant later: “The ground was literally covered with their dead.”
Young Sergeant Jeffrey, meanwhile, wrote that his battery’s one undamaged gun and “detached pieces of other batteries did efficient work in the repulse of the enemy on the evening of that terrible first day at Shiloh.” Battery members, he wrote later, regrouped at “their old camp” after the battle ended the next day, “having recovered their guns and equipments except horses.”
They were in for a shock. “A few days thereafter they were surprised by an order from General Hurlbut for the muster out of their officers and the assignment of the men to the Ninth, Tenth and Fourteenth Ohio batteries.”
Even years later, Jeffrey could not understand Hurlbut’s attitude. “Why this was done I do not know,” he wrote. “No doubt General Hurlbut thought he had sufficient reason, but the only apparent reason was that the officers in attempting to obey orders had lost their battery.”
According to Jeffrey, later an officer himself in the war, an official investigation by the Ohio Adjutant General’s office “fully exonerated Captain Myers from blame,” and further, according to Jeffrey, “The treatment of Captain Myers and his officers by General Hurlbut has been denounced as outrageous by all who knew of the affair.”
In the meantime, though, the war continued. Jeffrey found himself assigned to the 14th Ohio Battery, which now took over the old 13th’s remaining equipment. The 14th served honorably through the rest of the war—at Corinth, Mississippi, in the Atlanta Campaign, the Battle of Nashville, and the campaign against Mobile, Alabama.
At Resaca, Georgia, one day, the battery was asked to “knock out” some Confederate snipers in distant trees. “It took us but a short time to knock them out,” Jeffrey reported, and the onlooking General James B. McPherson “remarked that in all his military experience it was the first time he had ever seen artillery used for the purpose of sharpshooting.”
Another time, the battery marched so long through such completely stripped Confederate countryside in parts of Georgia and Alabama that its horses starved to death. Later still, the 14th Ohio covered 4,500 miles just in the final five months of the war.
If Jeffrey didn’t see much of the war with the ill-fated 13th Ohio, he and a number of his old compatriots certainly did with the 14th Ohio.
“Granny” Lee
IT WAS A CRUCIAL BATTLE OUTSIDE RICHMOND. THE COMMANDER’S PREPARATIONS were not always the best, and the enemy’s superiority in numbers was overwhelming. When the commander was suddenly wounded and incapacitated, the second in command was available to take over. He simply was not up to the job, though, and the enemy was virtually at the gates to Richmond.
Who to call in? Well, there was that deskbound fellow, that veteran of engineers. Why not him? Robert E. “Granny” Lee. Bring him forward to the rescue—if he can.
It is difficult to believe nowadays, but there was a time during the Civil War when the South’s Robert E. Lee—now undoubtedly greatest icon of them all—was held in some contempt, was unknown to many, and was called “Granny” Lee by others for his supposedly slow, tentative ways.
Better-acquainted associates knew or suspected that he had strong fighting qualities…but not everyone knew. Not yet.
It was, in part, Lee’s own fault for being so gentlemanly in manner. He had indeed begun his Civil War career as a deskbound planner rather than a field commander. While he had experience in combat during the Mexican War and had been in charge of the military unit that was sent pell-mell to arrest John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859, th
ey were all small-unit actions, small potatoes in scope, however successful. Otherwise, his background largely was in engineering, defensive fortifications, and the like. A West Pointer himself, he had been superintendent of the academy for a time. But again, it was not the equivalent of major field command in war.
At the outset of the Civil War, Lee became commander of Virginia’s forces, initiated their recruitment and training, and began gathering a coterie of brilliant officers such as Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. With First Bull Run in July 1861, the Confederate forces showed they could win battles. The resulting acclaim went to the two commanders with the troops: Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard and Joseph Johnston. Lee, chained to his desk in Richmond, was not on hand, although Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, had gone up to Manassas to see things for himself. It was Lee’s planning, in significant part, that positioned the Confederate forces and his training programs that prepared many of the troops for their first combat, but few were aware of these facts, and in all the excitement he did not receive public credit. And yet, when the Southern forces failed to chase the Union troops into Washington and perhaps lost the opportunity for a bold stroke to end the war, Lee was criticized for not seizing that opportunity.
The smoke had hardly cleared when Lee, as an aide and adviser to Jefferson Davis, was dispatched on a thankless errand that would not redound to his credit as a commander of men.
He was sent into the mountains of southwest Virginia to “iron out the differences between Generals Henry A. Wise and John B. Floyd, two temperamental former governors of the state, and General W. W. Loring,” wrote Virginius Dabney in his Virginia: The New Dominion. Lee’s charge was to achieve coordination among the three separate commands and to end the various rivalries among the three generals. And yet Lee did not have real authority over the “feuding prima donnas,” adds Dabney. The gracious and genteel Lee was probably the wrong man to send on this errand—“What was needed was a knocking together of heads rather than attempts at tactful persuasion.”
Unsurprisingly, he was unable to achieve the harmony needed among the three commanders. And “when many of Virginia’s western counties went over to the enemy that winter, Lee got much of the blame.”
And perhaps fairly so. “Lee’s gentlemanliness, his humility, his unwillingness to be sharply categorical and critical in expressing his views, would plague him throughout much of the war.” Now fully bearded for the first time, Lee returned to his Richmond desk job accompanied by “sneers from the press, which referred to him derisively as ‘Granny’ Lee and ‘Evacuating’ Lee.”
His next assignment also lacked the color and sometime glory of combat command: He was sent south for the tedious work of developing fortifications for Charleston, Savannah, and the North Carolina coast, returning to Richmond once again in March 1862. By now, writes Dabney, “his reputation with the public was in tatters, and few could have foretold the future that awaited him.”
The Union’s George McClellan, meanwhile, had mounted his Peninsular campaign (between the James and York Rivers), intending to reach and seize the Confederate capital of Richmond. The slow-moving and overly cautious McClellan sparred for some weeks with Confederate field commander Joseph Johnston, but neither of the two found the bold stroke necessary to knock the other out of the contest.
McClellan, ironically enough, had seized upon White House Landing on the Pamunkey River, twenty miles east of Richmond, and turned it into a “small city of supply,” in the words of Virginia historian Clifford Dowdey. Circles within circles—the plantation here had once belonged to George Washington’s wife, Martha Custis, and it now belonged by inheritance to Robert E. Lee’s son “Rooney.” When McClellan seized upon it as a supply depot and staging base, Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee—a war refugee since being forced to leave her Arlington House to Federal troops the year before—was staying there. McClellan, though, graciously allowed her to pass through the lines with an officer escort to her own side—a relief for the distantly onlooking but helpless Lee.
A few weeks later, the McClellan-Johnston sparring finally led to the clash of giants—Johnston’s sixty thousand men versus McClellan’s one hundred thousand—at Fair Oaks, just a few miles east of Richmond. Johnston was twice wounded on the first day of battle, and Gustavus Smith, second in command, was not well enough to take over. Unshackled from his desk at last, Lee was sent forward to salvage the situation at the gates of Richmond.
What followed was Lee’s surprisingly aggressive, often brilliant leadership in the Seven Days Battle that forced McClellan to give up his dream of seizing Richmond. Of necessity, Lee began his new stewardship by digging in; the result was that he picked up a new nickname: the “King of Spades.”
By the end of the Seven Days, however, Robert E. Lee had acquired an entirely new image. Attacking again and again, albeit at great cost in human lives, he had saved Richmond. In the process, he had created his famous Army of Northern Virginia, which he would command for the rest of the war and take into Maryland, and even Pennsylvania, before it was all over.
In the meantime, various innovations made their appearance, including a Lee-inspired siege gun placed on a railroad flatcar that was brought into action under his subordinate John Magruder—“the first piece of railroad artillery ever used in warfare,” according to historian Dowdey.
Observation balloons had already made their debut, and down in Hampton Roads the Confederacy’s Virginia (originally the frigate Merrimac) and the Union’s Monitor had traded blows (neither one greatly harmed) in history’s first duel between ironclads. In like vein, the Confederacy would soon develop a submarine vessel, the belligerents would sow roads with “torpedoes” (early mines, actually), and the Gatling gun would just miss widespread use as an early “machine gun.”
In sum, the new kind of warfare that was dawning added challenges for the gentlemanly Lee, whom Dowdey aptly named a product of “old America.” Wrote Dowdey, too, of the watershed moment when Lee took command: “At the Seven Days, when the Army of Northern Virginia was born, the old America died, and the Union [that] Lincoln and McClellan tried to restore became as lost in time as the traditional society [that] Lee sought to preserve.”
Stirring Words Found
MINE EYES HAVE SEEN—IT WAS DARK AND BEFORE THE DAWN ONE MORNING IN Washington, D.C., just two city blocks from the Lincoln White House, when the New York–born woman in a hotel room took up pen and began to write down the words.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
For days she had struggled to find those words. For days she had seen the soldiers from her hotel window, had heard the tramp-tramp of marching feet, and had heard their old camp-meeting song, again and again. Only they called it “John Brown’s Body” in reference to the crazed abolitionist who had tried to seize the U.S. Army arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Now, in 1861, Julia Ward Howe hardly needed the Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s urging to write fresh lyrics for the haunting tune that the soldiers obviously loved so well. “I have often prayed that I might,” she told Clarke, who was with Julia and her husband, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, on a visit to Washington and the 12th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. (The Howes were Boston residents, and Clarke was their pastor.)
The fact is, Dr. Howe was far better known at the time than his wife, Julia. A committed human rights activist, this proper Bostonian had spent time in a Prussian prison while attempting to help Polish refugees, had spent six years of his life as a fleet surgeon and even guerrilla fighter with Greeks fighting the Turks, and at home had taken up the cause of the insane and retarded, the blind and the deaf. It was only natural, then, that he would seek out and marry a woman who was a committed feminist, peace advocate, and abolitionist, becoming with her coeditor of the antislavery journal The Commonwealth. After taking up wife Julia’s great cause, Samuel Howe plunged into activities such as opposing the forced return of escaped slaves, joining hands with the Free-Soilers of Kansas, and e
ven developing vague ties with John Brown—ties close enough to force Howe to flee to Canada after the Harpers Ferry affair.
With the Civil War under way by 1861, however, he was back home and serving as a New England regional director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, that good agency that sent doctors and nurses into Union-held battle zones to care for the wounded and injured of both sides. He had been dispatched to Washington by the governor of Massachusetts to make sure the Commonwealth’s young soldiers were taken care of in proper and healthy fashion. Julia and the Reverend Clarke accompanied him, and it was from her Willard’s Hotel window that she could see the Union campfires dotting the city environs every evening, could hear the tramp of many thousands of feet, could catch the strain of that song afloat in the air, again and again. Quite often it took the form of a march, thanks, it is said, to the adaption by the bandmaster of the 12th Massachusetts.
The tune cried for more acceptable, stirring words.
She awoke one of those tumultuous, early-in-the-war mornings in Washington, not far from where Lincoln slept. It was an hour or so before dawn, the room still dark, and the words suddenly had come! As a mother, she had learned beforehand how to write down her thoughts in the darkness of the children’s nursery at home, and she now snatched up both pen and a piece of paper—stationery from her husband’s Sanitary Commission. She scribbled rapidly before the words forming in her head, marching to the distant drumbeat, could fly away. She was successful, and soon her lyrics had flown across the country, soaring in a million hearts.
How far and wide did her song travel—how lasting was it? At Libby Prison in Richmond two years later in mid-1863, a black well-wisher slipped word to the Union prisoners held there of the great victory at Gettysburg. They sang in thankful jubilation Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” its new words by now well known, repeatedly sung, and even published in the Atlantic for all to see, learn, or memorize. Not long after in Washington itself, a former prisoner from Libby Prison told an audience of that memorable and moving moment at the prison. The storyteller, a chaplain McCabe of the 122nd Ohio, then sang Julia Ward Howe’s song before the Washington audience, a rendition so heartfelt that onlookers shouted, wept, sang with him, and burst into wild applause when it was over. President Lincoln was there, too, exclaiming, wrote Julia’s daughters many years later, “Sing it again!” And “the tears rolled down his cheeks.”
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 12
