Castle’s next step was to tell the four captains still with his regiment that they had no overall commander. In response, they dispatched him to the brigade commander, clearly visible on his horse just two hundred yards away. Castle started out on the errand to settle the matter of seniority among the captains, “but before I had made half the distance, he, the last of our brigade commanders, was shot before my eyes and fell to the ground a corpse.”
Another Union private, George H. Daggett, found himself during the same battle in a strange wood.
It was a patch of cedars, about two hundred acres, with the ground covered with rock—all slabs, boulders, and fissures. There was no soil, and the tree trunks were so thick and close they were almost impenetrable—“so near together that the sunlight was obscured and the vision extended but a short distance horizontally.”
The Union men who retreated into this shelter at one point had no idea what was going on just outside the cedar woods. All they knew came from “avalanches of sound which assailed us from every direction.”
The Confederate enemy poured artillery and musket fire into the wooded patch, while close by other Union forces fought off other Rebel forces. “Thus on all sides we were stormed at and stunned by the conglomeration of fiendish noises that came seemingly from every point of the compass.”
Then, too, “not the least terrible of these sounds was an occasional explosion of the hot, fierce, indescribable Rebel yell.”
Echoing Daggett’s impressions, an onlooking Union officer was aware that the Confederate left was desperate to overrun the cedar woods and reach the Nashville Turnpike beyond, thus to cut off the Union force there. Union General William S. Rosecrans rushed forward some reinforcements into the woods, but under the pressure of the determined Confederates, they were inadequate. The Union officer could not see into the woods and estimate what was happening. All he knew was that “nearer and nearer came the storm; louder and louder the tumult of battle.”
Luckily, Rosecrans had massed more men along the turnpike, for quite suddenly, “10,000 fugitives [Union troops] burst from the cedar thickets and rushed into the open space between them and the turnpike.”
Many of the fleeing men fell to the fire of their Rebel pursuers from behind, but “fresh crowds…burst from the thickets” to replace the fallen—to overrun their prone forms in the field. For long moments it appeared the routed regiments would even overrun the Union line formed along the turnpike.
Indeed, “it was with the greatest difficulty that some of the regiments, which had been massed together as sort of a forlorn hope, could prevent their ranks from being crushed by the mass of fugitives.” And the pursuers? Previously hidden from sight in the deep deep woods, they suddenly burst forth: “At last the long lines of the enemy emerged from the woods with a demoniac yell, intended to strike terror into the souls of the ‘Yankees.’”
From the awaiting Union line there came a “dazzling sheet of flame.” In that response, “an awful roar shook the earth; a crash rent the atmosphere.” The advance ranks of the Rebel charge “seemed to melt away like snowflakes before a flame.” In seconds, a vast cloud covered the field—“smoke which hid everything from the eye.”
While in one quarter the Union men still fled, in this covered field a fierce battle ensued before the onlookers. Yet it remained invisible to them. “The combat under that great cloud of smoke was somewhat similar to that in the woods. No one knows exactly what occurred. There was a shout, a charge, a rush of fire, a recoil, and then all for a time disappeared.” Yet there was no doubting what was happening inside the obscuring vapors. “For 10 minutes the thunder of battle burst forth from the cloud.”
Finally, the battalion of the officer who had been observing the battle was able to advance. His men found “no Rebels between the woods and the turnpike except the dead, dying, and disabled.” Those there were in the hundreds, on ground soaked and reddened with blood. “Since the annihilation of the ‘Old Guard’ in their charge at Waterloo, there has probably been no instance of so great a slaughter in so short a time as during this repulse of the Reb left at Murfreesboro.”
The left was certainly key to the entire day’s events, since each of the warring sides had decided in advance to employ his own left against the enemy’s right. In theory this would have produced a revolving-door effect. The Confederates, however, under Commander Braxton Bragg, gained the initial advantage by beginning battle an hour ahead of the Union timetable.
On the Union left that morning, breakfast was still a very recent memory, and the troops had barely begun to cross the Stones River with the town of Murfreesboro as their goal when, reported Union officer William D. Birckham, “some firing” was heard on the right, “but not enough to indicate a battle.”
Not for long, for suddenly, “all hearts were thrilled by a sound sweeping from the right like a strong wind sweeping through a forest.” The Rebel left had hurled itself against the Union right.
The sound was the “din of battle,” swelling up rapidly. Then came a tide of fugitives from the thickets. “You have seen cinders from burning buildings flying when the conflagration was still invisible. You could hear the roaring flames and crackling beams. Seeing the cinders, you would say, ‘There is a fire.’ You had not yet felt the blast, but its avant-couriers were unmistakable. These teamsters [wagon crews] Negroes, soldiers, flying before it were cinders from the flames of battle.”
That early development, of course, spoiled the Union plan to advance with the left, since the Union right already was giving way to the Rebel left. Later, after the charge through the cedars and the equally invisible battle under the cloud of smoke, the trend again reversed itself, and the Rebel left was beaten back, all at great cost to both sides.
In the midst of that day, good Kentucky men on the Rebel side at one point met good Kentucky men on the Union side—many of them old friends and neighbors from the same county. “As soon as they came near enough for recognition,” related Union Colonel Charles S. Greene later, “they ceased firing, and began abusing, and cursing, and swearing at each other, calling each other the most outlandish names.”
For a time the Kentuckians paid no attention to the violent battle all around them, but that couldn’t last. “By mutual consent they finally ceased swearing, and charged into each other with the most unearthly yell ever heard. The muskets were thrown away, and at it they went, pulling and gouging.” And why not? At least pulling, gouging, yelling, and cussing was not killing each other.
The Confederate 3rd Kentucky was “getting the best of it” when the outsider 9th Ohio intervened and took many of the Confederates prisoner. “As the late belligerents were conducted to the rear, they were on the best terms with their captors, laughing and chatting and joking; and they all became jolly as possible.”
Spank the Boys
INTREPIDLY HE PUSHED ON AND ON. “SEVERELY WOUNDED,” IT SAYS IN HIS CITATION for the Congressional Medal of Honor, “and exposed to a heavy fire from the enemy, he persistently remained upon the field of battle until he had reported to…[General William Tecumseh] Sherman the necessity of supplying cartridges for the use of troops under command of Colonel Malmborg [Company C, 55th Illinois Infantry].”
Many a man performed similar brave duty when called upon, rather than fail his comrades in battle. After all, it is every soldier’s duty to ignore the storm of shot and shell and to press on.
Every man’s duty, even when struck in the leg by a Minié bullet while on the way with a crucial message for General Sherman. Such was the case that day in May 1863 at Vicksburg for Orion P. Howe, native of Portage County, Ohio.
He was no average Union soldier, and not even a man. Not yet, anyway. At age fourteen, he was his Illinois company’s drummer boy, one of thousands, perhaps even forty thousand or more, of mere boys who marched off to war with the Union and Confederate armies.
In the Union forces alone, an estimated three hundred such youths served at the age of thirteen or even younger.
Indeed, by another reliable estimate, a startling twenty-five children began their Army tours at the age of ten or less! One was the redoubtable Johnny Clem, also known as “Johnny Shiloh” after his drum was knocked to pieces by a shell at Shiloh. Only nine when he “joined up” (a bit unofficially, it seems), Johnny not only became a lance sergeant by the time he was twelve, but he didn’t muster out of service for fifty-five years! It was 1916 before he finally retired, by that time a major general and the last Civil War combat veteran still in active service in the U.S. Army.
Many such youngsters slipped into Civil War units by the wink of someone’s eye or by one sort of chicanery or another. Most were drummer boys, buglers, musicians.
In young Clem’s case, the recruiters visiting his home of Newark, Ohio, in 1861 turned aside the small lad who tried to join their 3rd Ohio Regiment. One even said, “We can’t use infants here.” As David Mallinson reported in the magazine America’s Civil War, however, Clem hid in the baggage car of the train carrying the 3rd Ohio to camp at Covington, Kentucky. “Once there, he attached himself to the 22nd Michigan and became the drummer for Company C.”
At Shiloh in April 1862, his drum was hit as he tapped the advance for Company C. But there was more to come. “Drumless, Clem went into the battle of Chickamauga carrying a musket cut down to size.” Left alone at one point, he used the weapon to wound a Confederate colonel who “rode up and yelled for Johnny to surrender.”
After that they called him “the Drummer Boy of Chickamauga.” Taken prisoner just three weeks later and released in a few more weeks, he was able to serve as an orderly in the headquarters of Union Major General George H. Thomas and carry dispatches for Thomas in the Atlanta campaign, during which the youngster’s horse was shot down beneath him.
Rejected by West Point after the war for his lack of schooling, the young veteran appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant, the youth’s commander at Shiloh. Grant relented, and Clem was allowed a commission as a second lieutenant in the Regular Army.
It should be noted that other youths managed to gain entrance to the military academies. One was Orion Howe, the fourteen-year-old given the Medal of Honor for his bravery at Vicksburg. Sherman recalled the wounded youth’s message so well, he gladly appointed him to Annapolis, but Howe struggled with the books and bowed out after two years.
Another appointee received his boost from none other than Abe Lincoln, who often showed interest in the welfare of the Union’s drummer boys. Young Robert Henry Henderson, also of a Michigan regiment (the 8th), came to Lincoln’s attention as “the Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock,” a sobriquet given after the teenager crossed the icy Rappahannock River at the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 11, 1862, by hanging on to a boat carrying Union soldiers across under heavy Confederate fire. Losing his drum to a piece of flying shrapnel on the far side, he took up a musket, found a Reb soldier, and took him prisoner.
After the boy’s discharge, Lincoln asked War Secretary Edwin Stanton to find a job for “the gallant drummer-boy Robert H. Henderson.” The result was a messenger’s berth in the U.S. treasurer’s office. Later still, Lincoln endorsed Treasurer Francis E. Spinner’s recommendation of Henderson for appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. At that time, Lincoln wrote: “I know something of this boy, and believe he is brave, manly and worthy.”
The U.S. Congress late in the war acted upon the reservations of many who felt mere children should not be thrown into war; as might be expected, the boys did not always live to become men. Congress acted in March 1864 to prohibit the enlistment of anyone under sixteen—action finally taken after a young Cincinnati boy was killed in battle at Resaca, Georgia.
Most men in the Union armies—all but 1.5 percent—fell into the age bracket of eighteen to forty-six, with an average age of 25.8 years at the time of enlistment. Only hundreds served at age fifteen or less, although the numbers began to jump into the thousands for consecutive ages. At age sixteen for instance, 2,758; at age seventeen, 6,425; at age eighteen, 133,475—the largest age group among all Union soldiers.
The real youngsters not only served as musicians (and mascots) but as “gofers,” too. They were seen in camp as barbers and water carriers, and on the battlefield, they tended to the wounded—or even took a wounded man’s place in the line.
If the enemy didn’t kill or wound such a youngster, his own compatriots might! Some boys were sentenced to death for desertion. Lincoln once took up the cause of such a youth the day before his scheduled execution. “I am unwilling,” wrote the president, “for any boy under 18 to be shot; and his father affirms that he is yet under 16.” Another time, informed of a fourteen-year-old facing the firing squad for desertion, Lincoln wrote to War Secretary Edwin Stanton: “Hadn’t we better spank this drummer boy and send him home?”
Perhaps Lincoln on such occasions was thinking of home life in the White House itself, where son Tad sometimes wore a Union officer’s uniform tailored to fit his diminutive stature, where Tad and brother Willie subjected an unfortunate toy soldier named Jack to occasional “execution,” and where a playful Lincoln once wrote a pardon sparing Jack from still another firing squad. Perhaps Lincoln’s obvious empathy for the boys in service reflected the fact that his beloved Willie died of fever in early 1862, long before the war ended.
Injury Added to Insult
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 2, 1863, DISPUTING CONFEDERATE OFFICERS GEORGE Moody of a Louisiana artillery battery and Pichegru Woolfolk of a Virginia artillery battery were scheduled to duel with rifles at ten paces—except that this was Gettysburg, and events overtook their disagreement and postponed their duel forever.
A Confederate legislator, Henry Cousins Chambers, did attend a duel, however—in his case, rifles at fifty paces. He killed his political rival William Lake in the process. Chambers then took his seat in the Confederate Congress—and no one rose to oppose him in the next election.
It was a violent period, with people often killed over insult, honor, politics, and the slavery issue even for years before the Civil War broke out. Abraham Lincoln once came close to a dual by broadsword, but it was called off at the last moment by mutual agreement. Even during the Civil War, not all the passion and violence were directed at the enemy.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, preeminent as a cavalry leader for the South, was a notoriously violent man. Well known among Civil War buffs and historians even today is his angry threat directed at Braxton Bragg, a senior Confederate general. Face to face and very personal indeed, Forrest called Bragg “a damned scoundrel” and said, “If you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path, it will be at the peril of your life.”
Not so well known is the time Forrest and a fellow officer in the Confederate Army came to blows, with a truly dismal result. The scenario began when a youthful artillery officer was placed in charge of two recently captured Union artillery pieces. The young lieutenant, Andrew Willis Gould, first served with his cousin Colonel Alonzo Napier’s Tennessee Cavalry Battalion, and next with Morton’s Tennessee Battery.
Then came a firefight on April 30, 1863, at Sand Mountain, Alabama. Gould had to withdraw too quickly to take his two guns, but he spiked them, at considerable personal risk. All that Forrest heard, unfortunately, was that Gould had lost the two precious guns. A pending command slot went to another officer, and Forrest questioned Gould’s courage.
The unfairly maligned young man confronted Forrest at Columbia, Tennessee, on June 13, 1863, and a heated argument followed in the hallway of the Masonic Building. Gould suddenly struggled to pull his pistol out of the pocket of his lengthy coat of linen, while Forrest, anticipating trouble, reached into his own pocket for his penknife.
Gould was unable to free his weapon, which suddenly discharged. At almost the same moment, Forrest was opening the penknife wih his teeth and lunging at Gould. The pistol ball lodged in Forrest’s left hip with a painful impact that produced a visible reaction. With one hand, Forrest managed to grab Gould’s hand, which no
w held the freed pistol, and pushed it up into the air while at the same moment, with the other hand, plunging the penknife into the younger officer’s rib cage.
The next few minutes were filled with pandemonium. Gould ran from the building into the street. Other officers rushed Forrest, stunned, into a nearby doctor’s office. Two more doctors, one of them a relative, saw Gould staggering in the street and pushed him into a nearby tailor’s shop.
In his haste the doctor treating Forrest made the mistake of blurting out that the hip wound could be fatal. Forrest was enraged. “No damned man shall kill me and live,” he shouted, jumping to his feet and taking to the street in search of Gould.
In the tailor’s shop, Gould looked well enough—he could stand and could talk—but blood squeezed out of his puncture wound with every breath. One doctor tried to help him while the other hurried off for his surgical instruments.
In the street Forrest still raged. “By God, he has mortally wounded me and I’ll kill him dead before I die,” he roared again. One officer told Forrest “that damned scoundrel is not much hurt,” but a local citizen said Gould was “bleeding profusely” and likely to die.
Forrest told the citizen to get out of his way. By now Forrest had taken a pistol from the saddle gear of a horse tethered nearby and had somehow found another. He burst into the tailor’s shop brandishing both weapons wildly and cursing. As Gould dashed into a back alley, one pistol went off, the bullet striking a bystander in the leg (a minor injury, as it turned out). Pursuing Gould, Forrest found him supine in a clump of weeds, pushed at him with a foot, and turned away. After commandeering Gould’s two doctors, Forrest then learned that his own wound would not be fatal after all.
With that welcome news, he suddenly told the doctors to hasten to Gould’s aid and “spare nothing to save him.” It is still unclear whether Forrest later visited Gould and granted him forgiveness, as some accounts report, but it is absolutely clear that in the aftermath it was Forrest who soon rode off into battle again. Young Gould died just days after the ugly incident.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 17
