Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865

PART ONE

Grant’s Army

CHAPTER ONE

Raising an Army

RED SNOW FELL near Iowa City," reported the Des Moines Sunday Register on March 5, 1861. Editor George Mills hastened to explain that the color was caused by fine flakes of reddish clay mixed with the precipitation. Wind had swept dust into the atmosphere far to the west, providing the residents of eastern Iowa with a bit of unusual late-winter color. It was a simple scientific explanation, easily understood by modern Americans in this enlightened second half of the nineteenth century. Yet as editor Mills observed, many Iowans could hardly help wondering whether the eerie reddish cast of their normally snow-whitened plains was not some vague but appalling portent of terrible things to come. It may well have occurred to some Hawkeyes that the next winter’s snows might be reddened by the bloodshed of civil strife. Americans elsewhere would have asked themselves the same question.¹

On the same day the red snow fell in Iowa, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as president of a country that was tearing itself apart. The issue of slavery had festered between North and South for two generations, and for many people in Iowa, as in the other Midwestern states, the tension in Washington, D.C., was a matter of great concern.

In response to Lincoln’s election, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared itself no longer a part of the United States. On January 9, Mississippi followed. Florida went on January 10, and the next day it was Alabama. Other Deep South states followed throughout the month. On February 1, Texas became the seventh state to declare itself out of the Union. Later that month, representatives of the rebellious states met in Montgomery, Alabama, organized a government, styled themselves the Confederate States of America, and elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as their president. By March 4, when Lincoln was inaugurated and the red snow fell in Iowa, the dismemberment of the world’s only great republic and the establishment of a slaveholders’ regime in the Deep South seemed to be faits accomplis.

Throughout the winter, the fire-eaters in the Southern states had spoken of seceding peacefully if possible, violently if necessary, and Southern military preparations had gone on apace. Northerners watched uneasily. The news they read daily in the papers seemed no more credible than the freak of nature that had brought red-tinged snow to Iowa City on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration.

Here and there across the North, men began to think of making military preparations of their own. Some towns organized volunteer companies. In January, Henry and George Perkins, brothers and coeditors of the Cedar Falls Gazette, began encouraging the formation of such a group in their Iowa town. We have the material here from which to form a ‘crack corps,’ which, if properly organized and equipped, would be of great advantage to us on our gala days and public occasions, opined the Gazette, and who knows but in these troublesome times might be the means of preserving the country from ruin and give some of the members an opportunity to cover themselves with immortal glory. By the following month, forty men had formed themselves into the Pioneer Greys, so named after the common color of militia uniforms at the time. They drilled diligently and were soon gaining additional recruits.² Similar companies sprang up elsewhere. Peoria, Illinois, had four: the Peoria Guards, Peoria Rifles, Emmett Guards, and National Blues.³

Like the first jarring peal of a prairie thunderstorm came the news in mid-April that Confederate forces ringing the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, had opened fire on the United States flag and garrison at Fort Sumter in the predawn hours of April 12. Thirty-four hours later, the fort surrendered. On April 15, President Lincoln, following the example of George Washington in the days of the Whiskey Rebellion, called upon the states to provide militia for ninety days of Federal service—75,000 of them—in order to put down the rebellion.

All across the North, thousands of men scarcely waited for Lincoln’s call for troops. John L. Maxwell was behind the plow preparing his fields for spring planting when he heard the news of Fort Sumter. He put away the plow and horses, and set out for nearby Canton, Illinois, to join what was to become Company H of the 17th Illinois Regiment.⁴ George O. Smith was a student in the city schools of Monmouth, Illinois. Within the week, he had enlisted and, with several other youths, was eagerly working to organize a company. They too would end up in the 17th Illinois.⁵ Nearby Peoria, where the 17th would muster, got the news of Fort Sumter on April 13 and went into an uproar. Flags appeared all over town, including at the armories of Peoria’s four volunteer companies, now busily preparing to take the field. The enrollment of additional troops began that very evening.⁶

On April 15 in the Illinois capital, the Springfield Grays, who had the advantage of proximity, became the first company to offer its services to the state. The company became part of the state’s first regiment for the war, numbered the 7th Illinois out of respect for the six state regiments that had served in the Mexican War. Within nine days, the Springfield Grays had been joined by companies from all over the state in an encampment named Camp Yates in honor of Illinois’s governor.⁷

Enthusiasm ran high. Chicago seethed with outrage at the Confederate attack. Thousands of men volunteered to go and fight for the Union. Among them were the Highland Guards, a company of ethnic Scots, making a striking appearance in their Scottish caps. Their captain, John McArthur, a thirty-four-year-old Scottish-born blacksmith and successful proprietor of Chicago’s Excelsior Ironworks, won election as colonel of the 12th Illinois Regiment.⁸

Also joining the 12th Illinois was a company from the lead-mining town of Galena, in the far northwest corner of the state. The citizens of Galena held a mass meeting on April 16 to discuss news of the Southern attack. Mayor Robert Brand presided but promptly set the assembly in an uproar when he gave expression to antiwar sentiments and favored compromise and peace, as an eyewitness recalled. When the tumult subsided, a succession of more patriotic citizens made impassioned speeches pleading for manly resistance to Southern aggression. One of the speakers was a consumptive-looking lawyer named John A. Rawlins. Another was local U.S. congressman Elihu B. Washburne, who concluded by exhorting his fellow citizens to raise two companies of volunteers for the war. The meeting adjourned with the wildest enthusiasm and cheers for the Union.

Two days later, an even larger meeting convened at the courthouse in Galena, this time explicitly for the purpose of raising troops. Washburne suggested that the appropriate chairman for this meeting would be a quiet-spoken local leather-goods clerk who was a genuine West Point graduate and veteran of the Mexican War. Ulysses S. Grant—Sam to his friends— had made captain in the Regular Army but had had to leave the service in the early fifties because of an incident with alcohol. He had certainly seemed sober and reliable enough during the eighteen months he had lived in Galena, clerking at his father’s leather-goods store. The assembly elected him to the chair, which Grant took over with some embarrassment and a brief statement of the meeting’s purpose. No matter—Washburne and Rawlins could make the fiery speeches. Wealthy Galena businessman Augustus L. Chetlain chimed in, stating his own intention of going as a volunteer. A number of others stepped forward for military service that night, and in the days that followed, Grant, Chetlain, and the others canvassed the nearby towns of Jo Daviess County for more recruits. They soon had a full company, named it the Jo Daviess Guard, offered it to Gov. Richard Yates, and got orders to head for Springfield. Grant declined to serve as captain of the company. If an officer of his training and experience was of any value at all to the country, it ought to be at a higher rank. Chetlain got the slot instead, but Grant went along to Springfield to assist the company as it became part of a regimental organization.⁹

War meetings like the one in Galena were common all across the Prairie State and its neighbors. In Ottawa, Illinois, a similar meeting resolved that we will stand by the flag of our country in this her most trying hour, cost what it may of blood or treasure, and likewise determined to raise troops. The first company filled up in a single day. Others followed, including one company composed entirely of men over the age of forty-five and led by a captain who had served with Winfield Scott at Lundy’s Lane during the War of 1812. To their dismay, however, they discovered that the government was not accepting enlisted recruits who were over the age of fortyfive. ¹⁰

News of Fort Sumter reached Frankfort, Indiana, late on the afternoon of April 13, 1861. In the Clinton County courthouse, lawyer Lewis Lew Wallace was addressing a jury. The town’s telegraph operator entered and told the judge he had a telegram for Wallace. It was from Wallace’s friend, Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton, and read: Sumter has been fired on. Come immediately. With the judge’s permission, Wallace excused himself to the jury and left the case to his law partner. Then he mounted his horse and rode hard the ten miles to Colfax, where he could catch a train to Indianapolis that night. Son of a former governor of the state, Wallace had served as a second lieutenant in the Mexican War and in 1856 organized a militia company called the Montgomery (County) Guards. Now Governor Morton made Wallace Indiana’s state adjutant general for the purpose of supervising the raising of troops.

Within days, Lincoln’s call for troops arrived, requesting six regiments from Indiana. Wallace asked if he could become colonel of one of the new regiments, and Morton agreed. Before the week was out, Wallace reported to Morton some 130 companies at Camp Morton, near Indianapolis. That was 70 more than the number required by Lincoln’s call. As was even then being done in Illinois, Morton and Wallace decided that Indiana’s regiments should begin numbering where they left off in the Mexican War, so the first Indiana regiment for the Civil War was the 6th. Wallace carefully selected the ten companies he liked best for his own regiment, the 11th. ¹¹

Even out in Iowa, beyond the Mississippi River, news arrived and people reacted so quickly as to be ahead of Lincoln’s call for troops. In Keosauqua, on the Des Moines River in the southeastern part of the state, citizens suspended their ordinary business and stood around in clusters, discussing the news. They had already scheduled a war meeting by the time word of Lincoln’s call arrived, so they used the gathering to discuss the raising of a local company. On that much they agreed, but they disagreed on what kind of company to raise. Some were for raising a foot company, others a horse company, and still others preferred service in a cannon company. Someone called for a word from Van Buren County recorder James M. Tuttle, and that official, who farmed and kept a store in addition to his official duties, referred to the issue in dispute as involving infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and gave his opinion in favor of infantry. The townsmen were so impressed with his military knowledge that they agreed to raise a company of infantry and elected Tuttle to command it. Years later Tuttle admitted that in giving these definitions I went almost to the limit of my military knowledge.¹²

And so men flocked to the colors all across the Midwest, green as the late-April grass on the prairies and led by lawyers, clerks, and petty officials, but filled with enthusiasm and a deep determination to do their duty. They came in such numbers that the states quickly exceeded their recruiting quotas. The problem for many of the newly raised companies was gaining acceptance into the service. Some companies had to disband, at least for the time being, but most were eventually mustered into service. Some Illinois companies, like the Peoria Zouave Cadets, did so by crossing into Missouri and enlisting there as part of the 8th Missouri Regiment.¹³ As a border slave state, Missouri held divided loyalties. Many Missouri men would eventually enlist with the Confederacy, and thus the state would have had some difficulty fulfilling its U.S. recruiting quota if not for the influx of Illinoisans and others eager for a place in the ranks of any Union regiment that would take them. The 13th Missouri included one company from Illinois, six from Ohio, and only three from Missouri. The 9th Missouri Regiment included almost no Missourians at all—just Illinoisans.¹⁴

The Illinois legislature, foreseeing the nation’s need of more troops, authorized the state to raise an additional ten regiments—one from each congressional district—beyond the six of Lincoln’s original request. These regiments, the 13th through the 22nd Illinois, were filled almost at once. The state undertook to pay these 10,000 extra levies until the federal government realized its need for them. In like manner, Indiana’s redoubtable Governor Morton authorized additional regiments to be sworn into state service as the Indiana Legion, pending another call from the president.¹⁵

The extra regiments, as well as the other companies clamoring for acceptance into Federal service in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa, did not have long to wait. Lincoln and his advisors in Washington soon recognized the need for more troops than the initial 75,000 and for longer terms than the original ninety-day enlistments. Early in the summer, the president called for additional troops to serve for three years. After the Union debacle at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, Lincoln issued a call for 500,000 three-year volunteers. With that, there was plenty of opportunity for everyone who wanted to be a soldier, and the states turned down no more companies, provided they had the requisite number of enlisted men. Officers, though usually devoid of training or experience, were never in short supply.

Indeed, the supply of would-be officers sometimes outstripped that of men prepared to follow them. The result was a bizarre competition for recruits. The man who successfully recruited a company would get a captain’s commission, so the race was on to raise the enlistments of the necessary eighty-four privates. Whereas companies during the first few weeks of the war had tended to be overstrength, aspiring captains were so numerous by late summer that many struggled to reach the requisite minimum enrollment for their companies.

Joseph Cormack, a conductor on the southern division of the Illinois Central Railroad, and Wimer Bedford, a mail agent on the same line, got permission from Governor Yates to raise a company of infantry. Cormack was to be captain, Bedford his lieutenant, and when the company was complete, they were to report at Anna, Illinois, and become part of the 18th Illinois Regiment. By the time they started, however, most of the willing recruits in the district between Centralia and Cairo had already enlisted in other companies. After several weeks, Cormack and Bedford had only a handful of recruits to show for their efforts, and most of these had been brought in by one especially enterprising recruit whom the aspiring officers promptly made a sergeant. Finally the last day of their recruiting authority arrived. They must report a full company the next day or give up their hopes for commissions. That evening their sergeant brought them interesting news. Camped in the woods not far away was a full-strength company that another captain had recruited and was taking to Anna to join the 18th. The rival captain had left his men sitting cold and hungry in the woods while he went into town and got drunk. Cormack sent his persuasive sergeant to talk to this leaderless unit and offer them good quarters and rations. The plan worked, and Captain Cormack was soon commanding Company D, 18th Illinois, while the drunken would-be captain, upon sobering up, found the woods empty.¹⁶

Throughout the summer and fall months, recruitment proceeded. In communities all across the Northwest, individual citizens made the decisions that would eventually place them in the ranks of the Army of the Tennessee. From Pekin, Illinois, Dietrich Smith wrote a friend, Every young man in our church will go.¹⁷ Hoosier lad Noah Sharp decided to go, but his mother had other ideas. Undeterred, Sharp climbed out his bedroom window one night, slid down the porch column, and walked all the way to Logansport, where the 46th Indiana was forming.¹⁸

Near Iowa City, Iowa, David Henderson was a twenty-one-year-old student at Upper Iowa University that year. He had been born in Scotland, and his parents brought him to America when he was six. When war came, and the large calls for troops began, he decided to lay aside, for the time being at least, his promising career at the university and, along with two brothers, enlist in the 12th Iowa Regiment. It was not an easy decision. Three brothers of us met together one night . . . under the old family roof, he recalled, and agreed that in this great land of our adoption the hour had come for us to lay our lives at the feet of our common country. We slept none that night; all sat up. In the morning, before parting, the old father . . . born in Scotland, too, took down the old family Bible . . . and after reading it, knelt among his little group of Scottish-American children, prayed to the God of nations to guard us and make us brave for the right, finished the prayer and said amen. The three brothers then left to join a company of their fellow students called the University Recruits. ¹⁹

Students at other schools also laid aside their books. The Illinois State Normal University, a teachers’ college just north of Bloomington, had a remarkable president. Charles E. Hovey was a well-known educator, described by one contemporary as an able, earnest and enthusiastic man. Shortly after Fort Sumter, he took the lead in forming a military company composed of teachers and students of the university, and the sight of Hovey and his men drilling became a routine feature on campus during the spring months.

In July, business took Hovey to Washington, and he was there when the eastern Union army set out on its much-heralded On to Richmond campaign. Hovey became one of the many civilians who went along to see the show, but when the enemy made a stand behind Bull Run Creek, thirty-five miles from Washington, Hovey proved unlike most of the frock-coated rabble in that, instead of sitting down with a picnic basket, he somehow supplied himself with a rifle and took potshots at the Rebels. Back in the capital after the battle, Hovey paid a call on Lincoln, told him about the Normal Company, and got his blessing to recruit it all the way up to regimental strength.

Hurrying back to Illinois, Hovey raised the additional nine companies in three weeks, and what was soon to become the 33rd Illinois joined other troops just outside Springfield at Camp Butler with Hovey as colonel. The 33rd was nicknamed the Normal Regiment, the Teachers’ Regiment, or occasionally the Brain Regiment, and indeed it did include in its ranks an unusual number of college graduates—thirteen in one company, all of whom were privates. A few days after they arrived at Camp Butler, one of the privates received a letter offering him a professorship at a prestigious college back east. He turned it down.²⁰

Meanwhile, in the region around Iowa City, some members of the University Recruits helped stage recruiting meetings both to boost their own company’s numbers and also to help raise another company known as the Iowa City Temperance Zouaves. The meeting in Clermont was especially effective, as twenty-three men signed up. Whenever a man was enlisted cheers were given, recalled one of the university men. The old flag was carried around the room and each man, as he enlisted marched after it while the cheers of the people rent the air.²¹

The Wisconsin River Volunteers tried the same method in their neighborhood around Delton, Wisconsin. With color-bearer, snare drummer, bass drummer, and fifer, the boys would pile into big wagons for the ride to nearby towns, shouting about how being a soldier meant Fourth of July every day in the year! The meetings, held in local schoolhouses, were well attended, as a good show was not that common an occurrence in rural Wisconsin in those days. After some stirring music, the captain, sounding much like a camp-meeting preacher, would exhort men to enlist in the army of the Lord. The young ladies often seemed to become more enthusiastic than the young men at this point, urging their male friends to enlist. One became especially zealous and, turning to her beau, cried, John, if you do not enlist I’ll never let you kiss me again as long as I live! Now you mind, sir, I mean what I say! The soldiers chimed in: John, you’d better go with us! Come, now, John, if I were in your place I’d enlist! Come, John, now’s your chance! It was no use. A member of the company later admitted that they garnered few recruits at these meetings but had a famous time.²²

Some of the most effective recruiters for the 55th Illinois, a northern Illinois regiment, were several Methodist ministers. Well known from their extensive circuit-riding ministry throughout the region, they traveled widely across the northern counties, eloquently exhorting men to step forward and serve their country and the cause of freedom. Three of the Methodist preachers undertook to raise and lead companies as captains. So effective were they as recruiters that they not only filled their own companies but also helped the other captains of the 55th to fill theirs. ²³ Elsewhere across the region, other clergy did the same.²⁴

Sometimes recruits preferred to enlist with others of their own ethnic group. In such cases, ethnic identity took the place of the normally strong local connection of individual companies. The 58th Ohio was to be a regiment made up entirely of Germans, the fourth such regiment the state had produced. Though recruits were drawn from all over the state, only enough Germans could be obtained to fill seven companies of regulation size. Much to the Germans’ dismay, the state recruiting authorities decided to finish out the regiment with three companies of ordinary Ohioans. Many of the men in the three extra companies had good German names, but their forebears had come to America long before, and much to the disgust of the more recent immigrants, they were thoroughly Americanized.²⁵ Other states had ethnic regiments too, such as the all-German 43rd Illinois.

A company in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, prided itself on having one truly unique recruit. He was a young bald eagle they called Abe. Some Chippewa Indians had caught him near the Flambeau River just after maple sugar season that spring and sold him to Daniel McCann for a bushel of corn. An eaglet was not exactly Manhattan Island, but McCann figured he had made a good bargain. He took the bird to Chippewa Falls and tried selling him to a company recruiting there. To their everlasting obscurity, the Chippewa Falls boys turned him down, so McCann took the eagle downstream to Eau Claire, where Capt. John Perkins was organizing a company known as the Eau Claire Badgers. Perkins and his men knew a first-rate mascot when they saw one. A local businessman bought the bird for $2.50 and presented him to the company. Perkins and his men named the eagle in honor of the new president and then changed the name of their company to the Eau Claire Eagles. There were any number of badger companies in Wisconsin, and some of them actually had badgers for mascots (and very ill-tempered mascots they must have been), but an eagle—that was something special. The Eau Claire Eagles soon became Company C, 8th Wisconsin. Eventually the whole regiment came to call itself the Eagle Regiment, carrying Abe as a sort of extra ensign, perched on a specially decorated pole whose bearer marched beside the regimental colors.²⁶

The companies of new recruits were very much the creatures of their local communities. Raised locally of neighbors and men who had known one another most of their lives, they were bound to their local communities by myriad ties of kinship and friendship and usually by the names they bore before they became simply lettered companies of numbered regiments. The Rockford Zouaves were very much a living element, indeed, a part of the military embodiment, of that northern Illinois town on the banks of the Rock River both before and after they became Company D, 11th Illinois, just as the Wisconsin River Volunteers were of their community of Delton, even after their official name changed to Company E, 12th Wisconsin. Between the part of the community that marched off to war and the part that stayed behind was the age-old unspoken covenant between a soldier and the society for which he fights. The soldier goes forth to face hardship and possible wounds and death, while those who remain at home undertake to back him both by supplying his material needs and by giving him moral support. The latter could come in the form of public ceremonies—parades, rallies, and the like—letters, or the supplying of comfort items beyond the bare needs of warfare. The U.S. Army commissary and quartermaster departments would eventually become the chief conduits of the soldiers’ basic material needs, but the local communities remained the source of moral sustenance throughout the war. A soldier in the ranks of the Washington Guards of Dubuque might come to refer to his unit as Company A, 3rd Iowa. He might fight for freedom and the flag, but in his mind the most vivid reality behind that flag was the community on the banks of the Mississippi that was his primary source of moral assurance.

At no time was local support for the troops more starkly visible than in the opening months, when companies were gathering and marching away. Thomas Connelly of the 70th Ohio recalled how the citizens of West Union would bring in chicken, pies, cakes, honey and jellies for the men at his regiment’s camp of assembly. The members of the regiment were always bade welcome to any home in West Union, as well as in the local Sabbath-school and church, where many of them attended regularly until the regiment transferred out.²⁷

In those first months of the war, the soldiers’ uniforms, if any, were the product of committees of local seamstresses. Many enthusiastic women strove to make other items of usefulness. Peoria ladies fashioned knapsacks for the National Blues company out of the oilskin capes that had been worn by the Wide-Awakes, the Republican drill teams that had paraded for Lincoln in the 1860 election campaign. Others found more innovative ways to help. A Peoria woman sent the company a large quantity of small feather pillows because she thought they would be light for the boys to carry on the march.²⁸ The ladies of Oskaloosa, Iowa, sewed 101 havelocks—cap covers with a large flap in back meant to protect the wearer’s neck from sun—for the men of Company B, 5th Iowa, prompting soldier John Campbell to exclaim in his diary, Who would be a bachelor, while there are single ladies in Oskaloosa?²⁹ In fact, however, after the first few days or weeks, Civil War soldiers never wore havelocks.

The women of Cedar Falls, Iowa, not only sewed uniforms for their Pioneer Greys—gray wool trousers and navy blue cotton shirts—but also provided them with shoes, socks, and underclothing.³⁰ Similarly, the female teachers and students of Miami University in Ohio set themselves to sewing flannel underwear for all the members of the University Rifles. Far too demure to ask about sizes, they simply guessed, and the result, sometimes ill fitting, was the occasion of not a little merriment to the recruits.³¹

One of the most useful items made for the departing soldiers was an article called a housewife, a small, often decoratively stitched, folding pouch designed to carry needles, pins, thread, and buttons. The soldiers kept such articles with them throughout the war, since they were easy to carry and of immense use in repairing damaged uniforms. The ladies of Delton gave one such housewife to each of the departing soldiers of the Wisconsin River Volunteers.³²

The most important and universal local gift to the departing company was its flag. The flag carried enormous significance both as the symbol of the nation and as the company’s tangible link with its home community. Wives, mothers, sisters, or sweethearts of the soldiers usually sewed it with their own hands, and a delegation of them presented it to the assembled company in a formal ceremony. A representative of the ladies would make a stylized presentation speech, and then a representative of the company, usually the captain, would reply with a speech of his own. Miss Ellen Fisher’s address to the Ottawa Rifles, soon to be Company H, 11th Illinois, was typical of the genre, if a bit shorter than usual. It also expressed clearly the implied covenant between soldier and community. Beloved soldiers, Miss Fisher began, we present you this banner. It is the flag of our native land. It represents our dearest hopes for country, home and life. Our hands have made it, yours must defend it, and if needed for the purpose, the choicest blood in your veins, we doubt not will freely pour out. Our best wishes attend you. Our prayers will follow you; and if you fall in your country’s cause, we promise that your names shall be often spoken with tender pride so long as we shall live. See to it that this flag is never insulted with impunity. God bless you, and God bless our native land. Farewell.

Capt. Theodore C. Gibson responded by thanking the ladies for the flag and pledging his company’s faithful service to it and the cause for which it stood.³³

Occasionally the men who were enlisting recorded in diaries or letters their motivations for going to war. A recruit writing a letter might say what he thought a man going forth to fight for his country was supposed to say, but in a diary a man was usually writing for himself. If anything, he seemed to be setting down his grounds for enlisting, so that he might be reminded of it if he later forgot. John Campbell of the 5th Iowa wrote in his diary, "I believe that duty to my country and my God, bid me assist in crushing this wicked rebellion against our government, which rebellious men have instigated . . . to secure the extension of that blighting curse—slavery—o’er our fair land."³⁴

For each of the companies, the meetings, speeches, and special services eventually ended and the day came to march off to the large assembly camps where they would join other companies to form regiments and larger units. It was a day anticipated with excitement by the soldiers and with dread by many they left behind. Oh that departure! wrote Dietrich Smith of his company’s exodus from Pekin, Illinois. As the Volenteers passed down court street to the levee all was covered with people. The Band playing some cheering others crying.³⁵

In Cedar Falls, Iowa, 5,000 were on hand to see the Pioneer Greys off to the war. Main Street was lined with dense crowds as the parade set off. Escorting the Greys to the railroad station was the Cedar Falls Brass Band, followed by about twenty gray-haired veterans of the War of 1812. Then came the young volunteers, on the way to their own war, proudly wearing their gray pants and dark blue shirts. The crowd fell in behind and followed the procession to Cedar Falls’s brand-new train station—the tracks had reached this Iowa town only a few months before. There a special train waited, decorated with flags, bunting, and cedar boughs. The company broke ranks for final good-byes, and the jubilation was tempered by at least one woman who stood sobbing, with two small children clinging to her skirts. The volunteers then boarded the train, followed by the band and about fifty civilians who would travel with them as far as Dubuque.³⁶

In Delton, Wisconsin, the Wisconsin River Volunteers piled into the thirteen wagons that were to take them to Madison. Then the village parson stepped forward and exhorted the new soldiers to keep up good courage, as one of them recalled, never for a moment to doubt that in our most trying hours—on the battle-field, in sickness, in death—that the prayers of loving and faithful hearts are ascending for us to the kind Father in heaven. The preacher led in prayer, and then the wagons rolled forward. The townspeople walked alongside the slow-moving vehicles until they came to the bridge over Dell Creek. The wagons crossed, while the citizens stood on the Delton side, and shouts of Good-bye went back and forth across the narrow stream. Waves from the wagons continued to answer fluttered handkerchiefs from the bridge until the road passed over a crest and the departing soldiers disappeared from view.³⁷

The journey to the camp of assembly could be an ovation. During the trip from Oxford to Columbus, Ohio, the University Rifles received such vociferous cheering that one member recalled, We began to feel that we were heroes already.³⁸ James Dugan had a similar experience as his 14th Illinois traveled from Shelbyville to Quincy. At every station . . . the populace had assembled to see those who were going to the war, and our passage all the way, may . . . be called an Ovation. Best of all, wherever it was practicable, refreshments were served. ³⁹

What the recruits encountered when they reached the large camps where troops were assembling was often their first, slight foretaste of the hardships of soldiering. Each state hastily established several points of assembly. Illinois’s main installation was Camp Yates, just outside Springfield. In peacetime, Camp Yates had been known as the Fair Grounds. Many of the new soldiers now quartered in the stalls normally used for animals. These were three-sided structures open to the out-of-doors on the fourth side; so the soldiers sometimes rigged makeshift curtains across that side. They built their campfires just outside on the open side of the stall. That was a problem since many of the stalls’ open sides faced west. The wind has been from the west ever since we came in, wrote Cyrus Dickey of the 11th Illinois, & the smoke from our camp fires (which are in front) fills all the stalls or quarters with smoke. It was, Dickey concluded, a pretty rough life, but not more so than I anticipated. ⁴⁰ George L. Paddock of the 12th Illinois recalled, The Fair Ground was not a place of sumptuous resort; yet those recruits who were transferred to Camp Yates, after a night or so spent at Camp Taylor, which was another and more military name for a brickyard near by, deemed it a comparatively spacious and habitable piece of land.⁴¹ The story was much the same at fairgrounds all over the Midwest. In Chicago, several regiments were housed in the cavernous wooden Wigwam, the convention hall in which Abraham Lincoln had been nominated the year before.⁴²

At Camp Randall, in Madison, Wisconsin, Abe the eagle continued to attract just as much attention as he had in Eau Claire. When the Eau Claire Eagles marched into camp there for the first time, its musicians playing Yankee Doodle, Abe, who was perched on his platform alongside a small American flag, took one end of the flag in his beak and spread his wings with a continuously flapping motion, much to the delight of onlookers. The people of Madison flocked to camp to see the bird, and the quartermaster at Camp Randall had a new perch built for him. It featured a shield decorated with the Stars and Stripes and the inscription 8th Reg. W. V. A few inches above the shield was a crosspiece for Abe to roost on. At each end of the crosspiece were three arrows, in imitation of the Great Seal of the United States. A man would carry the whole assembly on the end of a fivefoot pole. The base of the pole would fit in a socket attached to a belt that went around the bearer’s waist. Abe was kept securely tethered to his perch by a strong cord sixteen to twenty feet long, and when the regiment was on the march, the tether could be shortened to about three feet. The Eau Claire Eagles, now Company C, 8th Wisconsin, bore him proudly right alongside the regimental colors.⁴³

Occasions like the Eau Claire Eagles’ entrance to Camp Randall were just the sort of scenes many of the young men had pictured themselves being part of when they went off to join the army—Fourth of July every day in the year. However, at Camp Yates at Springfield, Camp Randall at Madison, Camp Jackson at Columbus, and all the similar facilities across the rest of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, the chief reality of military life, aside from boredom and discomfort, was drill. The muzzleloading weapons of the day required that soldiers do most of their fighting while standing in line. Using such linear tactics successfully required hundreds if not thousands of hours of close-order drill. Unfortunately, in many regiments the officers were almost as ignorant of the drill as the men to whom they were supposed to be teaching it. Asa Munn of the 13th Illinois remembered that at the Dixon, Illinois, fairgrounds where his regiment did its first training, the officers seemed to rely very much on a particular lieutenant who had once been to the East. There he had seen some militia marking time and gotten the idea that marching in place was a very soldierly thing to do. So the 13th did a great deal of marking time when the lieutenant could not think of any other order to give them. Yes, Munn wryly observed in later years, we brought to camp a full stock of military ignorance.⁴⁴

Some of the soldiers practiced a special type of drill known as the Zouave drill. Zouaves were originally French North African colonial troops who had performed well in European wars. They utilized light infantry tactics that emphasized open-order formations, with several feet between soldiers, rather than the customary close order, with its characteristic touch of elbows. They moved at double time, rather than marching at a stately cadence, and they lay on their backs to load their rifles rather than standing to do so. To fire they rolled prone and sometimes rose on one knee. Later the pressures of war would blur the differences between Zouaves and ordinary troops. The line troops adopted what was useful from the Zouave drill, and the Zouaves abandoned impractical flourishes. At the outset of the war, however, Zouave troops felt much superior.

Zouave units normally adopted special uniforms, more or less inspired by the traditional garb of the French North African regiments. These ranged from the gaudy to the downright bizarre. Among troops destined for the Army of the Tennessee, however, good Midwestern common sense tempered the excesses seen in the more outlandish uniforms of the East Coast Zouaves. Lew Wallace’s 11th Indiana Zouaves were an example. Their baggy Zouave breeches were sky blue, with button gaiters connecting to their shoes. Their jackets were of gray twill, in the short, Zouave style. Unlike many Eastern Zouaves, Wallace’s men eschewed turbans and fezzes and stuck with the standard kepi, the typical cap of Civil War soldiers. Theirs, however, were gray with red tops. ⁴⁵

Lew Wallace believed that the overall effect of the Zouave uniform was to magnify the men. The Zouave drill, he believed, gave the men confidence, self-reliance, and élan. Many soldiers agreed. The 14th Illinois was no Zouave regiment, but James Dugan recalled how pleased he and his fellow soldiers were when a Regular Army captain came to their camp and commenced instructing us in the Zoo-Zoo drill. ⁴⁶

Whether in Zouave or ordinary tactics, drill was the primary means of making farm boys, clerks, college students, and the like into steady soldiers. At Camp Douglas, near Chicago, the 55th Illinois drilled at least seven hours a day, mostly directed by the regiment’s martinet lieutenant colonel, a Swede named Oscar Malmborg, who was supposed to have had some sort of military background in the old country. The men hated him for his unrelenting and unrestrained abuse, but they thought his accent ludicrous— especially when it was belted out with all the force Malmborg’s lungs could muster, which was usually the case. Charge peanuts! the apoplectic Malmborg would roar, when he obviously meant Charge bayonets! Column py file, the lieutenant colonel would bellow, or What for you face mit your pack?

Besides drill, Malmborg was especially ferocious about the need for nighttime sentinels to maintain the highest possible alertness, even though the men as yet had no guns and had to march their beats armed only with stout oaken cudgels. One night Malmborg determined to catch one of the sentinels being inattentive, presumably in order to have the pleasure of ordering him punished. Approaching quietly through the thicket where the soldier was posted, Malmborg received, more or less simultaneously, a startled challenge and a tremendous wallop with the oak club. He survived, though knocked out cold for a few minutes, and for several weeks afterward bossed the regiment through its maneuvers with a very black eye.⁴⁷

The actual colonel of the 55th Illinois was Chicago lawyer David Stuart. Stuart, a man of somewhat scandalous personal life, had only the sketchiest of ideas of the drill manual and therefore made the mistake of having Malmborg direct all the regiment’s drills. This was easier in the short run, but it meant that Stuart fell further and further behind his regiment in military knowledge. Naturally his obvious ignorance steadily lost him the respect of the soldiers, which had been none too high to begin with.

Stuart was a prime example of the sort of man who, though prominent and successful in civilian life, simply did not have what it took to become a successful officer. It was not a rare breed. Hugh T. Reid was a highly successful Keokuk lawyer whom the governor of Iowa appointed colonel of the 15th Iowa Regiment. A man of the purest private character, of the most incorruptible honesty, of undoubted patriotism and loyalty, one of his officers described him, as brave as ever drew saber, and as ignorant of military tactics as any man that ever gave or attempted to secure the execution of a military command. Reid was, his subordinate concluded, a most striking illustration of a man not only respectable but eminent in important civic pursuits, who was utterly incapable of acquiring even a respectable knowledge of military drill and maneuvers.⁴⁸

A successful colonel had to have personal integrity as well as knowledge of military drill. One of the best colonels at Camp Yates was William H. L. Wallace. Like Stuart and Reid, Wallace was also a lawyer, and like Reid, at any rate, he was a man of rock-solid integrity, a devout Christian, devoted to his wife, Ann, and their children. Wallace won the respect of his men both by his character and by his skill on the drill field. Discipline comes hard on volunteers, Wallace admitted, and I am obliged to be severe sometimes, and expect some dissatisfaction.⁴⁹

Nevertheless, drill was military and made the men feel like soldiers. They were full of youthful enthusiasm and took every opportunity to show it. The boys of one of the Ottawa companies in the 11th Illinois developed their own special cheer for saluting the colors. It featured the name of their town with the three syllables separated and emphasized: one-two-three Au tau wa. The Ottawa boys were immensely pleased with it and believed it much superior to the popular tiger cheer. The Ottawa cheer commands the admiration of the whole camp, one of them proudly wrote to the folks back home.⁵⁰

One serious problem, both for drilling and for making the men feel like soldiers, was the difficulty of obtaining weapons. Although privately owned rifles were plentiful, the need for at least some semblance of uniformity in ammunition required that the regiments depend on government-issued arms. Whatever drilling was done in hometowns was done with empty hands or with sticks standing in for rifles. The various companies had marched away from their hometowns unarmed, and waited impatiently at the assembly camps to receive their weapons. The fact was that the United States did not have enough military arms on hand to equip the massive flood of recruits, and agents of the U.S. government were vying with those of the Confederacy to buy up surplus arms in the European market.

All regiments hoped for modern Springfield or Enfield rifled muskets, or perhaps, even better, the new breechloading or even repeating rifles. Some regiments got their wish. The men of northwestern Illinois’s Lead Mine Regiment, the 45th Illinois, were delighted to receive first-class Enfield muzzleloading rifles and considered their regiment one of the best equipped in the state.⁵¹ Many regiments had to make do with inferior arms. Some got various older model Springfield or Harpers Ferry smoothbore muskets, with less than half the range of the new rifles and atrocious accuracy. Others received grossly inferior imported Belgian or Austrian muskets. Using any of the outmoded weapons could be unpleasant. The 55th Illinois, raised in several of the same northern Illinois counties as the 45th, had been recruited largely with the promise that its men would be equipped with the amazing five-shot Colt revolving rifle. Instead they got the Dresden rifle, a deplorable import from old Europe. Language fails when attempting to describe the grotesque worthlessness of these so-called arms, recalled a member of the regiment. Others wryly quipped that with the Dresden rifle, it was the shooter who did the revolving, since, if the gun happened to go off when the trigger was pulled (by no means a foregone conclusion), the recoil was terrific.⁵²

Excessive recoil was a common complaint about inferior weapons, and it was not limited to guns of foreign make. John Hunt recalled that his 40th Illinois Regiment was originally supplied with the old Harpers Ferry musket, which, Hunt opined, was about as dangerous to those behind as to those in front.⁵³ The 47th Illinois got Belgian muskets, good hard kickers, wrote one of the soldiers, and like the human kickers, for the most part, harmless. ⁵⁴ When the 77th Ohio received Austrian rifled muskets, they were so angry that several companies briefly mutinied, stacking the hated weapons in front of their tents. They soon came around but remained unhappy about those guns. They were a very heavy, awkward gun, a member recalled, and had a very unpleasant habit of kicking back when fired.⁵⁵

One of the many activities that took place at the assembly camps was a reminder of this war’s odd mixture of the military and the political. All wars are political, but in this one, civilian political methods carried over into the army in unusual ways. When not drilling their companies, the various captains took time out to campaign for higher rank. This began with the assembling of the regiments themselves out of the collections of companies in the camps, and it almost smacked of a political convention with its horse-trading and backroom deal-making. A regiment consisted of ten companies, so many a captain sought to connect his company with just the right list of nine others so as to give himself the best chance of achieving promotion to the resulting regiment’s list of field officers—major, lieutenant colonel, or, best of all, colonel. The ten captains would meet and bargain and usually agree on a slate of candidates to put forward when the combined rank and file of the new regiment should vote for field officers.

The regiment that became the 11th Illinois included companies from towns scattered from one end of the state to the other, the result of a great many strategic calculations on the part of their captains. William H. L. Wallace, who had originally come to Springfield as captain of a company from Ottawa, vouchsafed to his wife in a letter he wrote on April 25 that if the right new companies showed up in camp the next day, he thought he might be able to win a colonelcy. If he did not achieve that rank, however, he assured his wife he would come home immediately. As a veteran of the Mexican War, Wallace felt it would be humiliating for him to accept a lower rank. He need not have worried. When the ten captains caucused, they were unanimous for Wallace as their colonel and T. E. G. Ransom, a bright young graduate of Norwich Military Academy who had brought in a company from Vandalia, as major. They could not agree, however, about who should be lieutenant colonel. It came to a vote, and Capt. J. Warren Filler of Effingham beat out George Paddock of Princeton, Illinois. Thereupon, Paddock took his company of disgruntled Princeton men and went in search of a more promising regiment. His place was filled by a company from LaSalle with a more reasonable captain, and on April 26, Wallace was able to report a full-strength regiment to the Regular Army mustering officer on duty at Camp Yates.⁵⁶

CHAPTER TWO

Cairo

ONE BY ONE, the new regiments got their orders to move forward to various posts in the theater of operations. The leave-takings from camps of assembly were often the occasions of ceremonies similar to those that had occurred when the companies left their hometowns. The 14th Illinois had assembled at Jacksonville, Illinois, and when it prepared to depart for its first duty station, the ladies of Jacksonville sent to Chicago and ordered the most beautiful bunting flag the city could furnish. The formal presentation ceremony took place May 18, with a beautiful young lady giving the oration and handing over the colors. From there, however, the ceremony took a decided turn for the worse. The regiment had obtained a 6-pounder cannon, and the colonel had appointed a squad of amateur artillerists to operate that piece of nonregulation equipment. Now he wanted them to fire a salute for the occasion. The first round went fine, but the gun crew neglected to swab the barrel before attempting to load a second. The resulting premature detonation tore off the loader’s arms and gave the regiment its first casualty.¹

Few send-off ceremonies could have made a more impressive spectacle to the eyes of contemporary beholders than that of Lew Wallace’s 11th Indiana Zouaves at the State House Square in Indianapolis. A large crowd was on hand, joining the regiment in cheering and singing patriotic songs. Delegations of ladies from Indianapolis and Terre Haute had prepared state and national flags for the regiment, and a Mrs. Cady presented them to Colonel Wallace.

Wallace expressed his gratitude to the ladies, then turned and made a speech to his men. He alluded to something of which most of those present were probably already aware. At the Mexican War’s Battle of Buena Vista, fourteen years earlier, a single Indiana regiment, fighting against long odds, had run away. Many of its scattered members made their way back to the front and fought alongside other U.S. troops, including the 1st Mississippi Regiment, which was commanded by Jefferson Davis, now the Confederate president. Although it was much to the Indiana men’s credit that they came back, this apparently drew the attention of the Mississippians, and led to Southerners in general sneering that all Hoosiers were cowards. Wallace rehearsed the story in detail and concluded by pointing out that the reproach of Buena Vista still adhered to the state. The stain is upon you and me. It attaches no less to these flags just received, because they are now our property, and we of Indiana. So what have we to do, my men? What but recognize that the war we are summoned to is twice holy—for the Union first, then to wipe the blot from our state and infamize our slander?

The colonel then concluded, Boys, then, will you ever desert the banners that have been presented to us today? Never! Never! the Zouaves roared back. Wallace had the whole regiment drop to one knee, raise their right hands, and swear, God helping us, we will remember Buena Vista.²

One by one, with fanfare or quietly, the various regiments shipped out. Fortunately for the often ill-equipped and semitrained soldiers of the first levies, operational assignments during the summer of 1861 were not particularly challenging and consisted mostly of garrisoning various key points along the southern and western fringes of Illinois perceived to be threatened by the forces of slavery and secession just across the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The most important of these posts lay at the confluence of those two streams. Located on a spit of alluvial mud in the acute angle of the rivers, the town of Cairo, Illinois, in the words of one unhappy northern Illinois recruit, was famous for dirt, filth, mud, mean houses and accommodations, and meaner men.³ Mary Logan, wife of a Union colonel, wrote of how the waters of the frequent floods stagnated in every depression and were soon covered by a green scum that sometimes nearly cut off Cairo from the rest of Illinois.⁴ The floodwaters also flushed out the impressive rat population of the wharves until they literally overran the streets at night. Camp rumor had it that the following January a drunken soldier, passed out in the gutter, was not only killed by the rats but skeletonized by them overnight.⁵ Cairo was the sort of place where men could believe stories like that one.

Located not only at the junction of the rivers but also at the southern terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad, Cairo was a strategic location for commerce as well as for war, but it had been hindered throughout its existence by the tendency to flood. The town’s population had grown tenfold during the 1850s, but secession, which had stopped the operation of the triweekly Cairo–New Orleans steamboats, had paralyzed Cairo’s economy.⁶ Still, the town was Illinois’s gateway to the Deep South. A soldier from the central Illinois corn belt wrote home from Cairo, We can stand on the levee & see parts of three states at one time, referring to Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri.⁷ In the summer of 1861, some feared that the Rebels just across the Mississippi in Missouri were making plans to occupy the strategic river junction.⁸

Cairo drew the largest portion of the nascent armies of Illinois, initially, and later those of the rest of the Northwest. There, where the southern tip of Illinois, farther south than Richmond, Virginia, pointed like a wedge down the Mississippi Valley, the Army of the Tennessee would first begin to coalesce. Several Illinois regiments got orders for Cairo by the end of April. The 11th Illinois went to Villa Ridge, a dozen or so miles from Cairo; the 7th to nearby Mound City, a half-dozen miles upstream from Cairo on the Ohio River. The 12th encamped at Caseyville, not far from St. Louis, ready in case trouble should develop from the direction of that sharply divided city. Other regiments went to posts in Missouri, where Union authorities were trying to establish and maintain control of the state. ⁹

The Rebels across the rivers in Missouri or Kentucky were not the only worry for Union forces that summer. Southern Illinois itself harbored unknown quantities of disloyalty. The southern counties of the Prairie State were known as Little Egypt because during the severe winter of 1830 settlers in northern Illinois had imported corn from southern Illinois just as the Old Testament patriarchs had done from the land of Egypt. ¹⁰ The area had been settled by Kentuckians and other Southerners, and its population had strong proslavery and possibly pro-Confederate sentiments. John Hunt, a young man living in Benton, Illinois, recalled that during the election campaign of 1860, it was rather dangerous to express your political sentiments. This was especially true if you happened to be a Republican and for Abraham Lincoln, in which case it was best to ‘hide out’ on election day. Hunt was no Republican. His family had come from the South, and he believed that in the prewar struggle to halt the spread of slavery the south was being needlessly oppressed by the free-soil element.¹¹

Lincoln, Yates, and other Union leaders worried about Little Egypt. It was as easy to imagine the southern Illinoisans shooting one way as the other. First, Governor Yates and, later, Union Western commanding general John C. Frémont, from his headquarters in St. Louis, dispatched troops to guard against possible trouble in Little Egypt. Various detachments of the newly raised regiments took up positions around southern Illinois at likely targets for pro-Confederate saboteurs. For example, two companies of the 8th Illinois spent weeks at the railroad bridge over the Big Muddy River, just north of Carbondale.

In fact, the situation in southern Illinois was not as bad as Lincoln and the others had feared. Hunt later explained: Like a great many poor misguided individuals living contiguous to the southern border I was almost ready to join the issue with ‘our brethren of the south.’ The deciding factor for Hunt, and apparently many others, was Fort Sumter. When the Confederates became the aggressors, and committed the unpardonable [sin] of firing on the flag, they revolutionized political sentiment in southern Illinois. Most Egyptians in 1861 were certainly not ready to fight against slavery, but neither were they prepared to tolerate slaveholders fighting to overthrow the Stars and Stripes and the Constitution of the United States. The vast majority of our able-bodied male population, myself with the rest, Hunt concluded, sooner or later enlisted under the banner of ‘Old Glory’ in defense of our country.¹²

Nevertheless, it would be some time before Lincoln would be able to rest entirely easy about the southern counties of Illinois. Newspapers like the Jonesboro Gazette were openly secessionist, and the Cairo City Gazette proclaimed the sympathies of our people are mainly with the South.¹³ In May, a band of about thirty-five Egyptians had set off to fight for the Confederacy. Making their way south of the Ohio, the Illinois Rebels joined the 15th Tennessee.¹⁴

To help ensure the shaky loyalty of Little Egypt, Lincoln called on some of his erstwhile opponents in Illinois politics, prominent Democratic politicians from the southern half of the state who were nevertheless loyal. Chief among these was Congressman John A. McClernand of Shawneetown, near the Ohio River about a hundred miles northeast of Cairo. After the death of his political mentor, Stephen A. Douglas, McClernand was the foremost Democrat in Illinois. Like Douglas, McClernand, though indifferent to slavery, was staunchly for the Union.

In June, McClernand went with fellow southern Illinois Democratic congressman John A. Logan to bolster the patriotic fervor of the troops at Camp Yates. One of the regiments to which they spoke was the 21st Illinois. The 21st had come to the field with an incompetent colonel whom Governor Yates had finally replaced with Ulysses Grant. Prior to that time, Grant had been rather discouraged at his inability to obtain an appropriate command. Now,