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PUBLIC LIBRARY FORT WAYNE & ALLEN CO. IND
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01704 2570
Gc 973.74 IN2M V. 1 [MERRILL, CATHARINE] 1824- 1900. THE SOLDIER OF INDIANA IN THE WAR FOR THE UNION
9
Eng ty GEF De & I.V
C. P.elloston
OLIVER T. MORTON GOVERNOR OF INDIANA
THE
SOLDIER OF INDIANA
IN THE
WAR FOR THE UNION.
" Let all the ends thou aimst at be thy country's, Thy God's, and truth's."- SHAKSPEARE.
S
-
INDIANAPOLIS : MERRILL AND COMPANY. 1866.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by MERRILL AND COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Indians
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA: .
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY DOUGLASS & CONNER.
411513
WHO HAVE GIVEN MORE TO THEIR COUNTRY THAN THE Mothers, Wives, and Sisters OF THE SOLDIERS OF INDIANA ?
TO THEM IS THIS RECORD OF THE HEROISM OF SON, HUSBAND, BROTHER,
DEDICATED.
OCT 10
PREFACE.
ON July 10th, 1862, we issued a circular, which was mailed / to the officers of every Indiana regiment, soliciting such information as would enable us to prepare a complete record of the part taken by our State in the suppression of the rebellion. In addition to a full narrative, we proposed to give the names of all Indianians who had fallen in their country's service, if not of all who had enrolled themselves in her armies.
Circumstances delayed publication and also compelled a. modification of our plan, especially in regard to the cata- logue of names. The men of Indiana must blame their own patriotism, so promptly, loyally and gloriously displayed that it would require the compass of a cyclopedia to contain individual names. At the same time it is gratifying to know that, under the able supervision of General TERRELL, a work of the kind is now in process of publication.
" THE INDIANA SOLDIER" was undertaken with the same motive and the same ardor which impelled the citizen to enter the army, but it has not been carried on with equal courage.
To write worthily of the cause may be as much less diffi- ctilt than to fight worthily as it is less glorious, but it is hard enough, and too hard. The mere reading of hundreds of hastily written letters is no small task, to say nothing of reconciling incongruous and deciding between contradictory statements; but this is light in comparison with gleaning the history of a regiment from most inadequate materials, and, in turn, this and all other toil sink into insignificance when weighed with the disappointment of failing to portray the
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vi
PREFACE.
privation, hardship, sickness, sorrow, patience, fortitude, gal- lantry, devotion and whatever else there may be of hard or noble, which enter into the soldier's life.
Unfortunately, the scenes and people of his home are the favorite subjects of the soldier's correspondence, conse- quently letters do not occupy the space that could be desired in our pages.
While we cannot deprecate all criticism, without throwing aside all claim to merit, we yet, in view of the difficulties and obstacles with which we have had to contend, and in view of our earnest and honest desire to do justice to patriot and traitor, ask indulgence.
We owe our thanks to the many who have aided us with information, especially to soldiers who have given us narra- tives, to officers who have furnished us with reports, and to parents who have entrusted to us letters and diaries of their sons. It is with something akin to awe that we take in our hands the sacred memorials of the dead. Written in the camp, on the picket line, or on the battle-field, with the smooth pen of the ready writer, or in clumsy characters and stiff style, on a fair sheet or a crumpled scrap, and tied up by fond mother with ribbon, or with yarn, they are all sorted and folded with the same care, and sanctified by the same tenderness and heroism.
With these words we give to the public this venture. Though it might seem immodest, perhaps ungenerous, to claim that our State, whose sons fought beside the sons of all her loyal sisters, encircling the rebellion with her regi- ments, is prima, yet we may be allowed to say, that, wherever any of the sisterhood, emulous in valor, endurance and devotion to the union of the States, made themselves conspic- uous, there proudly stood Indiana inter pares.
August, 1866.
MERRILL & CO.
THE SOLDIER OF INDIANA
IN THE
WAR FOR THE UNION.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
INDIANA is a young State with forests yet uncut, with swamps undrained, and fertile accessible soil untouched by the plough ; but she encloses within her borders, and shelters under her laws, a population of near a million and a half, - representatives of every country in Europe. The history of Vincennes and Fort Wayne dates back to the time of Louis le Grand, when missionaries and traders led small colonies, and ambitious statesmen sent military forces across the ocean and along the lakes to isolated western wildernesses for the promotion of their several objects ; and to this day the cus- toms and language of the French of that period may be found to some extent in the region of these towns. Swiss have cultivated the sunny slopes of the Ohio since the beginning of the present century. Irish in great numbers have within the last twenty years established themselves along the rail- roads and in centres of business. Germans, their thrifty hands having gathered silver in city employments, possess and culti- vate farms in every county. English and Scotch give their national peculiarities to many a small settlement. Norwe- gians and Laplanders sprinkle the northern districts. In addition to these members of the Caucasian race numbers of negroes live independently and somewhat lazily along Blue River and in other comfortable regions, and a few Indians fish, hunt, and do some small trading where through suffer- ance they remain.
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THE SOLDIER OF INDIANA.
Beholding this motley population, the transatlantic stranger, and even the friendly countryman from the western shores of the unfriendly ocean, are ready to declare that Indiana can have no oneness, and in consequence no distinctive character ; that, with materials unfitted and unfitting if not mutually abhorrent, she is and must long remain an unconglomerate mass. The inference is incorrect. A large majority of the population is of one stock, - the sturdy old English, - which, under the stirring influences of the seventeenth century, spread along the Atlantic coast from the bleak rocks of Maine to near tropical regions. Through the vicissitudes of time and repeated emigration, the characteristics of the English of that period have been retained. Indomitable energy, ineradicable love of home, unquenchable and deep- buried enthusiasm, only called forth by stroke of steel, and " that spirit of personal independence which may be sharpened into insolence or educated into manly self-respect," are as remarkable in the feller of Indiana forests, and the plough- man of Indiana prairies, as they were in the self-exiled Puri- tan or Cavalier; - and they form the outline of Indiana as they do of all American character.
The filling up of this fine hard English outline is the material derived from the various sources alluded to, and modified by as great a variety of circumstances. It is neither mean nor common, nor is it Irish, nor German, nor Swiss, nor Yankee, nor Southern. Like a grand piece of mosaic in which all colors are united to the obscuring of none, and the enhancing of the lustre of each, the typical Hoosier is dependent on every element for completeness, yet as a whole is dissimilar to any part. He is sensitive, excitable, bashful, and it may be boastful, enterprising, ardent, and industrious ; yet, as a farmer, is apt to leave weeds in his fence corners, and as a merchant dislikes to bother his brains with one cent calculations. He is no bully, yet is able to use his fist, and if he is accused of lying, -the vice most repugnant to his nature, - he loses not a moment in applying his fist in a free fight. In early times when an application to law required long and inconvenient journeys, he administered justice in a somewhat summary method : giving notice to an individual
3
INTRODUCTION.
who disturbed a neighborhood to remove, and if the notice was disregarded, administering a hickory limb or displacing a cabin roof. No other approach to mob-law has the genuine Indianian ever known; even in the case of an obnoxious neighbor his first impulse invariably was to join the weaker party; and he gave it up only when satisfied that neither justice nor generosity required its defence.
A decidedly religious stamp was given to Indiana charac- ter by the preachers of an early day, - often men of intellect as well as zeal, who found their way to the backwoods and preached Christ from a cabin-door, or from the shade of a spreading beech, to the sunburnt men and women gathered from the region round about. Many an old man now re- calls with a thrill the majestic or fiery eloquence of an Arm- strong, a Ray, or a Strange, as it rang through the Gothic aisles of the primeval forest. To those fervid laborers was it owing that the little church was erected as soon as the log-cabin afforded the shelter of a home. The contemptu- ous application of "North C'lina Church" to men of noto- riously worldly or otherwise wicked character, implies a clas- sification of a community which is significant of religious character.
Many of the early lawyers were men of rare wit and literary attainments, but they did not, like their preaching contemporaries, permanently influence the character of so- ciety.
Indiana's resources for material wealth are vast, and being rapidly developed. Little distinction in the condition of citizens exists. A man might perhaps number the rich on his fingers, and certainly could the beggars, except such as the Old World has sent over the ocean with cards certifying to an escape from a shipwreck or a volcano.
No young State shows finer institutions of learning or of charity. Yet many a boy never sees the inside of a school- house, and many a man drops into the ballot-box a vote he cannot read, and makes the cross instead of his name to a deed of sale or purchase.
There are in every community men who seem to be Nature's step-sons, rather than the sons of the bond-woman,
4
THE SOLDIER OF INDIANA.
- their hand against every man, and themselves the object of every man's upraised hand or foot. They form that float- ing population which is invariably borne on the first wave of the tide of civilization, and is the deadly foe to the true precursors of progress, -the farmer, the peddler, and the preacher. They form, too, that deposit which lies normally at the base, but penetrates sometimes to the very top of the mass of society. They are the fighting, hating, bitter, grasping element, - aristocrats in one position, levellers in another. The objects of their special hate in our western world are three: the negro, the abolitionist, and, somewhat inconsistently, the aristocrat.
The first murder in the capital of our State was commit- ted by a member of a small but notorious association called the Chain-gang, formed for the purpose of spattering the three objects of detestation with rotten eggs; of giving them nocturnal airings astride of rails, and of indulging in other disorderly and lawless proceedings. The sight of a son of a Philadelphia clergyman, - a young school-teacher who wore kid gloves and fashionable pantaloons, in those days called " tights," -inflamed the wrath of one of the Chain-gang to such a degree that nothing but death could appease its in- tensity. He was ferryman, and one fair day pushed from the shore of White River with the unsuspicious young gen- tleman in his boat. In mid-stream the offence was expiated. The ferryman reached the farther shore alone. For this most cruel deed the perpetrator suffered an imprisonment of two years in the penitentiary. That pardon is more effec- tual than chastisement in the correction of crime, seems to be a principle of Indiana officials, as such leniency is by no means uncommon.
The last victim of these murderous rowdies was a negro, - who, on the Fourth of July, had the impudence to walk on the pavement of Washington Street.
The links of the Chain-gang have long lain in the dust, or rusted in the wilderness beyond the Mississippi; but pas- sions do not die; and in the far more pretentious and widely extended Golden Circle we find a new embodiment of the principle of the ancient Chain-gang.
5
INTRODUCTION.
At the first election for Governor in 1816, on the admission of the Territory of Indiana into the Union as a State, the contest naturally turned on the question of slavery. Settlers from free and slave States were about equal in number, but the friends from North Carolina voted with the emigrants from the eastern and middle States, and the anti-slavery can- didate was elected. As the question was entirely local, party lines of distinction rising from slavery were soon effaced, and slavery was for many years a subject of neither political nor social interest. A certain soreness, however, was pro- duced, and kept alive, by the escape of a slave, at rare in- tervals, in or through Indiana.
In 1824 or 1825, an individual informed a handsome slave- woman, Nellie, who was accompanying her master from Virginia to Missouri, that Indiana was free soil. In conse- quence she refused to proceed on the journey, and the master had resort to law. Judge Morris of Indianapolis, before whom the case was tried, pronounced the woman free. Judge Park of the Supreme Court, to which the exasperated master appealed, reversed the decision. Meantime the woman had fled, and she could not for several weeks be found. At last she was traced to a cabin occupied by a widow, on the bluffs of White River. The sheriff with his attendants appeared unexpectedly at the door. Admittance was delayed, and while they waited, the woman of the house, her head en- veloped in Nellie's bright colored handkerchief, sprang from the back window, and ran like a deer towards the woods. With a whoop and hurrah, like hunters when the game is in sight, the servants of the law followed. The moment they turned, the cabin-door opened, and with stealthy steps the fugitive, guided by a young girl, the daughter of the kind countrywoman, sought and found shelter in a neighboring cave. But Nellie was betrayed. With twenty dollars the sheriff beguiled the girl to point out her hiding-place. Inci- dents of this kind, serving as they did to awaken sympathies which otherwise would have lain dormant, were like drops gathering for the long delayed storm.
From the time of General Jackson's election to the Pres- idency in 1828, party spirit became warm in Indiana as
6
THE SOLDIER OF INDIANA.
everywhere else, although it was not until 1840 that national politics exercised a controlling influence in the election of State officers. During the following twelve years party spirit ran with great violence; but the defeat sustained by the Whig party, not only in Indiana but throughout the Union, in 1852, terminated its existence. In 1854, the slumbering vol- cano, which had shakeń the nation in 1820, and again in 1850, was a third time evoked by a repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
The fathers of the Republic, with the fact that slavery had been forced upon them by the mother-country in spite of clerical and legislative opposition fresh in their minds, and incapable of imagining their descendants seduced into an affection for and an approval of so vast an evil, regarded it as doomed to gradual extinction. The middle of the nine- teenth century found many willing defenders of what they called a divine institution. The citizens of the free States, opposed in principle and feeling to slavery, regarded it as the charge if not the curse of the South, and as such were unwilling to trouble, themselves with it; and yielded again and again to its repeated claims for protection. Many young politicians, blinded by personal ambition, gave their voices to the support of Southern views for the sake of obtaining Southern votes. In 1820 the State of Missouri was given up to slavery, freedom receiving from slavery in return the territory north of 36° 30'. In 1854 slavery denounced the existence of this barrier as a reproach and stigma, and in- sisted that the territory of Kansas which lay above the slave line, and was calling for admission into the sisterhood of States, should be received as a slave State. .
Opposition to this demand united large numbers of Dem- ocrats and Whigs with the small party of Free-soilers, and formed a new organization styling itself the Republican party, which by force of circumstances was confined almost exclu- sively to the free States. A small party ignoring the slavery question was organized, and called itself the Know-nothing or American party. The old Democratic name was kept by those who were in favor of letting the people of each Terri- tory determine what should be the character of its institu-
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7
INTRODUCTION.
tions as a State. This party carried the election of 1856 Indiana voting with it.
Emigrants poured into Kansas from the North, determined that it should be a free State; from the South, determined that it should be a slave State. Civil war, with horrors and outrages unparelleled, resulted. Prominent in this strife on the anti-slavery side was an old man, who, two years later, was to shake the nation from centre to circumference. This man, hating slavery as a personal enemy which had murdered his sons, as well as an enemy to human rights, conceived it his mission to destroy the monster. With an adaptation of means to the end proposed, worthy of insanity, he took twenty-two men, five of them of the oppressed race,. organ- ized in Canada a provisional government of the United States, with himself as Commander-in-chief, and penetrated to the mountains of Virginia, whither he had arms secretly shipped to furnish those who should join him.
Sunday night, October 16, 1859, he seized the unsuspect- ing village of Harper's Ferry and took possession of the United States Armory. The nation was astonished, electri- fied, at the boldness of the attempt. State and national troops poured to the spot, but were held at bay by the old man for thirty hours, when, having lost two sons and eleven others of his twenty-two, and having been himself repeatedly and seriously wounded, he was overpowered. The fanati- cism, as it was almost universally called, North as well as South, of John Brown, was equalled by the unflinching bravery, sturdy independence, patient endurance, and grim, puritanic piety which extorted the admiration even of those who demanded and took his life as the expiation of his crime. These traits were remarkably exemplified when the magnani- mous mother of Presidents carried to her bar on his couch her wounded, helpless prisoner, - pushed on his trial with unseemly haste to conviction and the death sentence, and · guarded the short remnant of the life allowed him, - which common humanity would have deemed properly passed in a secure hospital, -by thousands of her soldiers from the danger of an imaginary rescue to the scaffold.
This was in December 1859. In less than eighteen months
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THE SOLDIER OF INDIANA.
regiments of United States troops marched through the streets of the most conservative city of the North singing to a wild simple melody -
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, But his soul is marching on !"
The growth in the North of the sentiment of opposition to the extension of slavery, together with the division of the Democratic party, brought about by those who have since led in the attempt to divide the Union, insured the election of a Republican President in 1860; Lincoln being elected by a plurality 30,000 larger than elected his predecessor. The vote of Indiana, one of the most conservative States, had changed from a Republican minority of 46,681 to a majority of 5,923.
Although a Republican President was constitutionally elected, the judicial and legislative branches of the government were in the opposition, and would have remained so through his term of office, so that no offensive measures could have been passed, nor even objectionable cabinet ministers ap- pointed. Not only this, Congress declared its willingness to incorporate into the Constitution a clause utterly prohibiting interference with slavery in the States.
The loyal States, together with those which were trembling in the balance, sent delegates to a pacificatory convention presided over by an Ex-President of the United States, who as President having betrayed the party which elected him, has since eclipsed his old disgrace by the crime of treason to his country. Among Indiana's delegates to this conven- tion were Mr. Lincoln's Secretary of the Interior and General Hackleman, who lately gave his life to his country on the field of Shiloh.
But no honorable concessions could satisfy those who had predetermined the destruction of the Government. They un- derstood better than the North itself the deep significance of the election of Lincoln. It was an assurance to them that a spirit had moved upon the face of the chaos into which the political parties of the North had crumbled, and that they must break or be broken upon the new creation. It was an assurance that the power, which had not only filled the presi-
9
INTRODUCTION.
dential chair and courts of law, term after term, but had underreached and overreached, had misconstrued and misap- plied the Constitution, until the simplicity and integrity of that document seemed forever gone, had reached its flood. And it was an assurance, - but even the far-reaching states- men of the South did not recognize this, - of the upheaving of the heads of the everlasting rocks of justice, and of the utterance of the long silent divine voice : "No farther, ye waves of barbarism, shall ye go !"
The politicians of the South had not waited for this hour. More than thirty years every art known to them, - and no politicians are so wily as those of a Republic, - had been used to bring the Southern public into subjection to an oligarchy. Society itself from its very base passively seconded their efforts. The upper, middle, and lower classes which are usually found in civilized nations, and which the most demo- cratic communities have never yet been able to abrogate, are here merged into two, standing at a formidable and almost impassable distance. The common saying that " poor people are mean," harsh as may be the sentiment, is not incorrect in the society in which it originated. The poor whites of the South are monstrously degraded. Red-skinned savages were never more malicious and bloodthirsty. In the older slave States they are lazier and feebler than the correspond- ing class in the North: they submit without resistance to kicks, cuffs, and blows ; but let them scent the negro or the abolitionist and they are no longer listless and spiritless : their sallow visages light up, their skinny fingers clutch the rifle or the stone, and they are as kecn as bloodhounds. Yet wide as the barrier between them, the proud and selfish slave- holders, whose souls swelled with the endeavor to grasp the aggrandizement a future, independent of the plodding North, seemed to offer, and the luckless, slaveless dwellers of sandy or marshy regions, whose only foothold for pride is the inferior position of the negro, have one common ancestry, - for whether descended from convict or cavalier, their origin is English; as the harsh, coarse hate which distinguishes both, if not peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon, is at least incon- testably one of his characteristics, until eradicated by intel-
2
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THE SOLDIER OF INDIANA.
lectual refinement or religious principle ; and is so certainly alien to the French that it can be no heirloom of the noble Huguenots who sought a refuge on the west Atlantic coast, and who, excepting a few Spaniards, were the only other white settlers. They had also one common ground of in- terest and affection, and they burned with one common desire " to carry war to the densely populated cities of the North, which offered food for the sword and the torch, and to make the grass grow on the pavements now worn off by com- merce."* The stream of emigration which set in from Euro- pean shores early in the present century, carried a large pro- portion, especially within later years, of Irish emigrants to the South, where the element of disorder, inherent in the son of Erin, readily assimilated with the revolutionary tendencies of slavery - aristocracy and objectless discontent.
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