by John F. Ross
During the first seventeen days of May, the Army of the Tennessee would cover more than one hundred miles, fight five actions—Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and Big Black River Bridge—sever the Southern Railroad of Mississippi, take the state’s capital, and press Pemberton’s Confederates into Vicksburg. Battery F fought at the two final battles, Champion Hill and Big Black River Bridge. Three months of hard travel had driven into Powell critical lessons in the business of war—particularly the necessity for being flexible—but perhaps most important, the centrality of logistics. While Grant would receive most of his kudos from the civilian Northern press for his battlefield mastery, it was his logistical acumen, over a gallery of different landscapes, that would win the war, illustrating the axiom that amateur soldiers talk about tactics, while professionals study logistics. Powell could see what it took to live off a hostile countryside, which would figure prominently in his struggle against a more impersonal, ferocious enemy than the Rebels—the Colorado River.
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Thousands upon thousands of Confederate infantrymen now retreated into the citadel. They blocked approaches with felled trees, threw up military emplacements, and reinforced the twisting seven-mile line of defense, which clung to tangled clumps of irregular hills, bluffs, and narrow ridges. Some twenty-eight thousand Confederates now manned the elaborate landward defenses, while several thousand more covered the river batteries.
On May 19, and then on the 22nd, Grant threw headlong assaults at the fortifications, only to see both repulsed with telling casualties. Grant’s only choice now remained to besiege this key stronghold. The day after the last fruitless repulse, Grant ordered the construction of thirteen “approaches,” zones wherein tunnelers and trench diggers could work their way up to or under Confederate salients. Battery F took position at Ransom’s Approach—named after Brigadier General Thomas E. G. Ransom—on the northeastern outskirts of the city, into which they lobbed shells by day. Shaken by the realization that no structure, including their homes, offered sufficient protection, the town’s five thousand civilians began digging caves into the yellowish loess topsoil of the broad hillside. The besiegers snickered at this “Prairie Dog Village” but would have been startled to learn that some caves had grown sumptuous with carpets and furniture, even including doors and separate rooms.
Powell found himself at the heart of the action. The paucity of trained engineers, made particularly acute by the sheer length of the siege lines, gave him ample opportunities to take an active leadership role. The sappers worked hardest and most effectively under cover of night as they laid out the works and dug trenches. Sap rollers—large protective structures made of intricately woven baskets packed with earth—protected their slow but steady work. As they dug, so the rollers advanced. Powell’s battery continued to direct heavy covering fire into the city. They made fascines, bundles of cane bound together with telegraph wire that offered additional protection. Although the usual rumors flew that Grant was off drinking, he regularly visited Ransom’s Approach to draw upon Powell’s opinion.
On June 15, ground was broken at Ransom’s Approach, about two hundred yards from the Confederate lines. In ten days, the sap—some five feet deep and seven or eight feet wide, a series of half-parallels and winding boyaux—had crept to within seventy-five yards of the enemy rifle pits. Ransom ordered Powell to bring up two of his twelve-pounders to establish a dangerous, but brutally effective, battery position. The steepness of the sap forced the battery to unlimber the guns and drag the 1,230-pound brass cannon by hand and rope—grueling work in the heat of the Mississippi spring. Two days later, the Confederates, suddenly realizing that something was afoot, directed two Parrott twenty-pounders to rake Ransom’s Approach. Powell worked his men day and night in shifts, widening and reinforcing a small area that could hold two pieces, creating an earthen parapet with embrasures for the gun muzzles. In this confined space, the men remounted the guns, then brought up powder and shot.
They came so close to the enemy that the men needed to build mantelets, thick boards to cover the embrasures when not in use. When Battery F was ready, the gun crew slammed open their mantelet and opened fire. In that brief moment, a storm of rifle balls poured through. A gunner jumped on his smoking piece and yelled at the enemy, “Too late!”
Covered by Powell’s now ferocious close-range fire, the sappers pressed to within a few yards of the Rebel line by June 28, the day that nearby Logan’s Approach detonated a mine that collapsed part of the Confederate position. The Unionists prepared for an all-out assault on the fourth of July.
Union artillery and snipers, the destruction wrought by the mine explosions, and the terrible privations extracted by the dwindling supplies convinced Confederate commander lieutenant general John C. Pemberton that Vicksburg could no longer be defended. On July 3, he raised a flag of truce and met with Grant to discuss terms of surrender. That day Major General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac had defeated Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg. While not finished, the now-split Confederacy was clearly on the ropes.
While his comrades crawled into the caves dug by the townspeople, Powell explored the former no-man’s-land, particularly searching the waterfall and ledges at Mint Springs Bayou for bivalve fossils. But the six weeks of work in the saps had exhausted him, even if it had kept his mind off his throbbing stump. Simply unable to continue with his unit, he requested leave to go with Emma to Detroit, where his arm underwent a resection to deaden some of the incessant pain. In two months, he rejoined Battery F, but elected to stay behind when it joined Sherman on his march to Atlanta. His younger brother Walter marched on with the guns.
At Vicksburg, Powell assumed command of one of the newly formed U.S. Colored Infantry regiments, many of whose volunteers consisted of entire male family teams from particular plantations. Company B contained five Birdlong men from a plantation in Marksville, Louisiana—two men in their forties and three of their sons, all listed as eighteen, although they could well have been younger. The regiment also contained a contraband named General Jackson. Former slaves who had never known freedom underwent a culture shock in the Union camps, finding that their white comrades spoke in accents hard to understand and ate food alien to them. When Powell began training his five companies in weapon handling and garrison duty, it proved a frustrating experience. Few of his charges were literate. And these black men just tasting freedom were exchanging slavery for a new net of tight restrictions.
Powell worked through these problems with characteristic patience. What brought things to a crisis point—and one even he could do little about—was the ravages of disease. The white soldiers had already passed through a “seasoning” period, during which they either acquired various immunities or died. The newly freed inductees, until recently imprisoned on isolated plantations, had no exposures. They died in appalling numbers, leaving brief and heartrending military records. Of the 463 men under Powell’s command, more than a third died within months. It was a dispiriting task to set out to train these all-too-eager recruits who fell so quickly in front of him.
In late July, Battery F sustained heavy casualties at the Battle of Atlanta, in which Major General James B. McPherson, Powell’s overall commanding officer at Vicksburg and Grant’s best friend, was killed. The Confederates captured Powell’s brother Walter among a number of his fellow gunners, packing them off to prisonerof-war camps. Powell could learn nothing of their whereabouts, which only fed a deepening shadow of guilt that he had somehow let his unit down.
By September, no doubt partly moved by this guilt, even if undeserved, Powell turned down a promotion to lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Colored Troops and asked to be returned to his old unit in Atlanta. General O. O. Howard, now commanding the Army of the Tennessee—Grant having assumed the post of general in chief—appointed Powell to command all artillery units not presently accompanying Howard’s march. He took a promotion to major. Powell, noted his
superior, was “a straightforward and attentive officer,” just the man to combine dispersed units.
Now in charge of sixteen batteries and their thousand men, Powell was ordered to move them to Savannah, Georgia, and join Sherman on his march north into the Carolinas. Getting his guns and men there entailed a long, circuitous journey through Nashville, where Union general George H. Thomas was preparing to annihilate John Bell Hood’s Army of the Tennessee. Arriving at Nashville in the first week of December, Thomas pressed Powell into service, who, with two other majors, would oversee the construction of entrenchments around the city. When Thomas launched his final attack on Hood in mid-December, Powell rode by his side, coordinating the bombardment of Nashville’s defenses. The resulting conclusive Union victory proved to be the last full-scale battle in the western theater.
Two weeks later, Powell mustered out of the service. Four months after that, the war reached its endgame for all intents and purposes at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
Powell came home to good news. Walter had been released from a prison camp in Columbia, South Carolina. But his appearance shocked the major. The five-foot-ten youthful man with thick arms and a strong back had been reduced to a barely recognizable husk of the quiet schoolteacher he had so recently been. The Powells could give thanks that he had returned from the Confederate Camp Sorghum, but it had been a close thing. Conditions there resembled those at Andersonville, a name synonymous with mistreatment and want, prisoners living amid squalor, rampant disease, starvation, and brutal treatment by guards. There was little shade against the burning sun, and the imprisoned men lived in their own filth, which brought about frequent outbreaks of dysentery. Whether because of sunstroke, dehydration, or terrible stress, Walter had simply snapped. A fellow Illinois soldier recalled seeing him walk into the deadly no-man’s-land separating prisoners and guards, hands held aloft and praying in a loud voice “as mad as he could be.” He would suffer from bouts of anger, moodiness, and depression for the rest of his life.
Of the ten men who had left Hennepin to enlist with a song in their hearts, two had died, two were crippled for life, and one had deserted.
Powell himself had changed indeed. The war had proven a master class in how to solve problems on the fly and lead small units through unimaginably harrowing conditions. “The Western volunteer became on occasion a pack mule, a fighting machine, an intelligent thinker and talker upon the tactics of armies, logistics, and the policy of the Government generally,” wrote Lucian B. Crooker, whose 55th Illinois saw combat along with Powell at Shiloh and Vicksburg. They had built bridges, fixed railroads, stormed forts, besieged cities, foraged profitably off the land, and seen so many of their friends die. Powell could feel justifiably proud that he had paid a terrible but magnificent price for saving the Union.
Now, as the soldiers from both sides came home, Americans would turn back to the fitting business of a growing nation—a big part of which lay in developing the still-little-known West.
CHAPTER 4
First Thoughts West
At war’s end, a flood of the maimed returned home from the armies, the thirty-one-year-old Powell among more than twenty thousand Union soldiers missing a limb. He returned to a Victorian society with clear ideas about disability. “Formerly, a cripple was a cripple,” wrote journalist William H. Rideing, “and hobbled through the world an object of pity to sympathetic elders, and of derision of wicked youngsters.” Even after serving their country, the limbless soldiers would often be dismissed as “deformed,” bundled together with the blind, the mentally deficient, and orphaned children, as in one way or another not whole—and therefore unable to contribute seriously to society. For Victorian Americans, physical deformities suggested the presence of mental deficiencies. Views would begin to change—albeit slowly—in part by the sheer presence of so many disfigured vets.
Right after the Confederate capitulation, William Oland Bourne, a magazine editor with hard experience as a chaplain in a Civil War hospital, tried to invigorate Union veterans who had lost their right arms by offering cash prizes in a left-hand writing contest. He assembled an eminent board, including the first Theodore Roosevelt—father of the future president—to judge submissions. Good penmanship, Bourne believed rather patronizingly, would be a means for crippled veterans to find a middle-class job and reassert their manliness. Hundreds of entries poured in.
While some contestants rather predictably copied out the Emancipation Proclamation or the Gettysburg Address in childlike scrawl, others wrote heartbreakingly of their experiences. Many felt themselves victimized by an evil fate that no amount of restitution could offset. Now their country no longer needed them. “To be compelled just in the prime of life (when teeming with anticipation of future prosperity and pleasure) to consent to be a permanent cripple for life,” wrote John Thompson, “and to depend entirely on others for assistance is a matter of no small moment.” He felt that he had lost his place in society. Others, however, viewed their disabilities as a sign of bravery in freedom’s cause and hard-won manhood. One disabled corporal offered himself and fellow amputees as “living monuments of the late cruel and bloody Rebellion”; another that their conspicuous disabilities embodied “the price of liberty and Union, and are richer ornaments than the purest gold.” Ezra Hilts wrote that while the war “cost rivers of blood,” this sacrifice would “cement our Union more strongly and strengthen the whole framework of our government.” There appeared a wide no-man’s-land between those apparently condemned to a life of fatalism and those who remain charged with unbounded American optimism.
Powell showed no intention of retiring to a rocking chair on the porch of a general store to bore customers with war stories. His spilled blood and shattered bone had sealed a sacred compact tying him even more deeply and imaginatively to the cause of the Union. As to the physical nature of his loss, Powell rarely if ever called attention to it, let alone begged special consideration, although it had become an inescapable part of his functioning adult makeup. Indeed, he viewed his disability not just as a badge of honor but as a focus of endless purpose to bear him throughout his life. The Powell who emerged from the crucible of war seemed possessed by an unstoppable consuming energy, the restlessness and frustrations of his earlier days transformed now into a consistent driving power.
Powell’s achievements over the next few years give the overriding impression of a man burdened with something he must prove and make whole. Such a force would often be mistaken for pure ambition—as if this was the only thing that could surely convey such drive—but his iron will toward self-healing along with other deep currents were pressing him with far greater urgency and energies. He would need to prove himself over and over—both intellectually and physically. He faced a lifetime of people patting him on his shoulder with a pitying look in their eyes.
While other amputees would rise to positions of great influence—for instance, the left-arm amputees Lucius Fairchild and Francis R. T. Nichols, who went on to become governors, respectively, of Wisconsin and Louisiana—none would come close to matching Powell’s pervasive influence over the advancement of the nation. In four years’ time, the man now known as the Major—no longer “Professor”—could persuade others against all evidence that he was equipped not just in character but in intellectual grasp and leadership skills to confront and conquer one of the most onerous physical challenges attempted in American history. His presence often made able-bodied men uncomfortable, sometimes feeling inadequate, and indeed would stir feelings of resentment, sometimes to the point of anger. But it would also forge him into a yet more formidable leader, taking him beyond the courageous crippled gunner commanding Battle F under heavy fire at Ransom’s Approach.
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When Powell returned to visit his parents in Wheaton, Joseph told him to settle down to teaching and get “this nonsense of science and adventure out of your mind.” He listened with only half an ear. He turned down a nomination
for a lucrative clerkship of DuPage County on the Republican ticket, instead taking a professorship of geology at Bloomington’s Illinois Wesleyan University for far less money in the fall of 1865. While besieging Vicksburg, he had received an honorary master’s degree from Illinois Wesleyan, which, two years later, gave him the minimum credentials to assume the job.
The small prairie college had indeed hired itself an unorthodox professor, whose classrooms buzzed with rare excitement. “Text-books went to the winds with Major Powell,” his then student J. B. Taylor recalled thirty-five years later, evoking a third-floor classroom as clear in memory as if he had just rushed in to catch a class. For Taylor, the “artillerist, true to his artillery instinct, [was] firing his batteries all the while at the entrenched enemies,” which appeared to have been the sluggish orthodoxies being shipped out from Yale and Princeton. His classes followed him into the woods to collect plant and animal specimens, filled notebooks with observations, pressed flowers, leaves, and grasses. “He made us feel that we had conquered the commonplace, broken our way through the accepted, and come into the heritage of free thinkers.”
In March 1866, Powell delivered a lecture in Bloomington’s popular Sunday Lyceum series titled “Perpetual Motion,” in which he refuted the notion to an audience of students and townspeople. But the phrase also describes his almost manic activities on campus. Powell teamed with a mathematics professor to restructure the curriculum and rethink faculty responsibilities; he then drew up plans for a central building consolidating the fast-growing campus, designed a college seal, and coined the motto “Scientia et Sapientia” (“knowledge and wisdom”), all of which the university enthusiastically embraced. Still juggling a prodigious teaching load, he found time to establish a local chapter of the state natural history society, as well as a small museum, of which he named himself curator. But not even that could put his expectations to sleep. Having exhausted every opportunity at Illinois Wesleyan, he lobbied the nearby Illinois State Normal University for a faculty position. Normal boasted a much more substantial natural history museum, run by the Illinois Natural History Society.
