USA > Indiana > History of the Third Indiana cavalry > Part 3
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The advancing Union line, along its entire length, answered with a volley and yell equally as terrific and never wavered in its for- ward movement. The battle of South Mountain was on in all its ferocity. The thunder of all the artillery of both armies echoed and re-echoed down this lovely Middletown Valley, interspersed with rolling volleys of musketry and the fierce yells of desperate men engaged in a death struggle.
This lasted until 10 o'clock at night, when the Union troops had gained the crest of the mountain and Lee's army fell back, his first battle on Maryland soil having failed. The cavalry moved up and stood picket on the mountain summit the remainder of the night and at dawn moved down its western slope and was soon engaged in a fight with the rebel cavalry rear guard at Boonsborough in the next valley beyond. From this point the Third Indiana had the ad- vance to the eastern bank of Antietam creek overlooking Sharps- burg, where the rebel army had halted. With all the army the battalion lay upon the eastern slopes of Antietam creek until the morning of September 17, when, at daylight, was begun the battle which lasted until nightfall and in which more men were killed and wounded on both sides in one day than in any other battle of the entire war.
The Third Indiana crossed Antietam creek with Pleasanton's Cavalry at 10 o'clock in the forenoon and was in line of battle supporting artillery, but was not otherwise engaged and suffered no casualties.
On the night of September 19 Lee's army fell back across the Potomac at Shephardstown, and the cavalry followed up and was the first to discover and run upon his entrenchments on the south side of the river. The Army of the Potomac lay upon this battle- field recuperating until the first day of November, 1862, but during that time the cavalry was not idle by any means. It crossed
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the Potomac a number of times, feeling for the position of the enemy, and always found him in greater or less force and had numerous skirmishes. One of these encounters at Halltown lasted a good part of one day, the rebel cavalry making a desperate effort to capture a federal battery which was successfully resisted by the Eighth Illinois, Eighth New York and Third Indiana throwing themselves between the advancing enemy and the battery, and thus enabling it to retire safely across the Potomac.
While the Army of the Potomac lay on the battlefield of An- tietam, the cavalry of the rebel army crossed the Potomac at Han- cock and made a plundering raid into Pennsylvania, going as far as Chambersburg and passing around the outposts of the federal army, pursued by all the cavalry under General Pleasanton, and in which pursuit the Third Indiana participated, but its only brush with the enemy, after a sixty-mile ride, was at the mouth of the Monocacy, where the raiders were overtaken while attempting to get a herd of cattle, stolen in Pennsylvania, across the Potomac. No one was hurt, but some very fine steers intended for rebel con- sumption were recaptured.
The rebel force, with whom this engagement was had, was togged out in complete new federal uniforms, which they had cap- tured from the United States quartermaster at Chambersburg, and were mistaken for federal cavalry by General Pleasanton until they rode up within a quarter of a mile of where he had stopped to get breakfast, after riding thirty hours, and opened with artil- lery upon his headquarters.
The most momentous event of the war occurred while the Army of the Potomac lay on the battlefield of Antietam. Of course this was the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on the 22d of September, 1862, by the President of the United States. In a few days thereafter the President himself came to Sharpsburg and with General McClellan reviewed the army, riding by us on horse- back while each organization of troops stood at present arms. The
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battalion of the Third Indiana Cavalry stood in line but a few yards from the famous Dunkard church, where the slaughter on the 17th of September had been the most frightful of all that awful battle, and the great, sad-faced, martyr President as he appeared before us there is not likely to be forgotten while life and memory remains to any one of our number.
Through this Maryland campaign Lieutenant-Colonel Buchanan had been in command of the eastern battalion of the Third Indiana Cavalry. On the 24th of October, 1862, he resigned, and Major George H. Chapman succeeded to the vacant command.
The great and bloody battle of Antietam, fought in and around Sharpsburg, Maryland, on the 17th of September, 1862, has right- fully gone into history as one of the mighty conflicts of the war and was the end of Lee's Maryland campaign of 1862. It dem- onstrated also to the authorities at Washington that the time had come for a change in commanders of the Army of the Potomac.
General McClellan, who had commanded that army for a year, was what might have been termed the pet soldier of the Republic. Under his command the army had fought many but usually unde- cisive battles. Antietam was a drawn battle and settled nothing. All of Lee's rebel army was engaged, and it was fought piecemeal by the Army of the Potomac, opening on the right at daylight with an onslaught by Hooker's right wing, and running down the line two miles to the left, when at 2 o'clock in the afternoon Burnsides became engaged with Stonewall Jackson and fought until after dark. In the rear of Burnsides' position, all day long, lay Gen. Fitz-John Porter's division, the best and finest body of troops in the whole army, that never fired a gun.
It is not for historians to fight battles, but they do have the right to draw conclusions from facts. The humble private in the ranks looking on Burnsides' conflict with Jackson for six long hours with nothing gained, wondered why Fitz-John Porter's splendid body of splendidly equipped men, and only a mile away,
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was not sent to the assistance of Burnsides. It was spoken of in the ranks the next day by men of humble station as the two armies still lay confronting each other.
To the men engaged in that battle it looked that, had Burnsides been assisted by Porter's division, the rebel right would have been doubled around on to its left with serious results. As it was, Burnsides was able to hold his own. With double and more than double the force engaged on our left, would not Jackson have been swept off his feet ?
From that day General McClellan, who always provoked cheers from his soldiers when he appeared before them, lost caste with the army, and the authorities at Washington could plainly see that the time was close at hand when it would be safe to do what they had long felt should be done, viz., change the head of the Army of the Potomac.
During the year of his command General McClellan had built up around himself a great and formidable personal following, and this following had made itself felt throughout the North, espe- cially in the Eastern and New England States. He had built up this following by the diplomacy which flatterers always employ. He sounded the praises of his regiments to their faces on the slightest provocation, and the plan took so effectually that many of the objects of his flattery were ever ready to defend and con- done any apparent blunder as really the exploit of a great com- mander. This cajoled element in the army had to be reckoned with. They were ready to raise the cry that with McClellan's removal from command the country was lost.
The leading papers of the country were ably represented by field correspondents, who were generally found clustered around the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, and the reception they always received from the head of the army made them ever ready to sound his praises and conceal his blunders, and when the change came were prompt to sound a doleful cry of disasters
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sure to follow. The rank and file of the army was represented as ready to rise in mutiny as their response to the action of the government at Washington. The fact was that no such feeling existed, and this fact was detected by President Lincoln, and he took the step all knew was right.
After the first spasm of the flattered alarmists had died out all went on as well as it had in this great army, while McClellan went home to use his arts of flattery in scheming for the presidential nomination of the party that opposed the war, and the leading declaration of his platform after receiving that nomination was that the "war was a failure."
The impartial verdict of history is that Mcclellan, and not the war, was a failure. And this was the verdict of the voters at the ballot box in November, 1864, when they declared for a con- tinuance in power of the great and patient man who subsequently died a martyr for his country.
On the 26th of October, 1862, the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac left Maryland soil and recrossed the Potomac river at Berlin, Maryland, and began its southward movement in the direc- tion of Richmond. Skirmishing with the rebel cavalry began almost at once. The Third Indiana was now a part of the Second Brigade.
General Pleasanton in his report of operations at this time (Vol. XIX, Part 2, page 125) says: "On November 1 the com- mand moved forward and occupied Philomont, several hundred of Stewart's cavalry leaving about the time we entered. Colonel Gregg, with the Eighth Pennsylvania and Third Indiana Cavalry, pursued this cavalry and drove it very handsomely from some woods it had attempted to hold, but, the enemy bringing up his artillery, no further advance was made, except to silence the rebel guns by the fire of Pennington's battery. The rebels left five dead on the field. Our loss was one killed, and one officer and thirteen men wounded.
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"On November 2 my advance came up with the enemy at Union. They had some infantry supporting their guns and very soon some sharp fighting began, which resulted in the blowing up of one of their caissons, by which a number of their men were killed, and their retreat for several miles on the road to Upperville."
The report of Col. David McM. Gregg, Eighth Pennsylvania, of the affair at Philomont is also found at page 129 of the same volume.
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The Third Indiana and Eighth Illinois were on the ground where the caisson blew up, to which General Pleasanton refers, almost before the smoke had cleared away, in their pursuit of the rebels flying towards Upperville, but all we found were splinters, broken wheels, artillerymen's caps and clothing, but no carcasses.
This Virginia country east of the Blue Ridge mountains was traversed by splendid turnpike roads, walled on either side by stone fences, and winding over hills and through valleys, and was a lovely land to look upon. Stewart's cavalry was the rear guard of the rebel army and was contesting every step of the advance of the federal cavalry under Pleasanton. On November 5 we en- countered them at Barbes Cross Roads, where we lost five killed and eight wounded. On the 6th we ran on to them again at Waterloo, and on the 7th at Amosville and Little Washington, and in that action captured two guns, also three officers and ten men. On the 8th we skirmished at Newbys Cross Roads, on the 9th at Corbins Cross Roads, and on the 10th the rebels, both infantry and cavalry, from Culpepper attacked Pleasanton's command in force, and prisoners taken reported that it was a movement by General Long- street to ascertain where the Army of the Potomac was. It was a red hot fight, in which both infantry and cavalry participated on both sides, and the rebels fell back at nightfall without gaining the information they sought. General Pleasanton says in his report, "that this action closed the campaign of the cavalry in Loudon and Fauqier counties, as orders were then received directing no
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further advance towards Culpepper, and informing the army that Major-General Burnsides had relieved Major-General McClellan of the command of it."
In closing his report on page 128 of Vol. XIX, General Pleas- anton says: "It is but justice to the troops I have had the honor to command that I should mention the results of their laborious exertions and chivalrous gallantry under many adverse circum- stances. From the time the army left Washington to the end of the campaign at Washington the cavalry of my command had taken from the enemy six pieces of artillery, four stands of colors and 1,000 prisoners of war without losing a gun or a color."
In the return march of the Army of the Potomac in the direc- tion of Richmond, the capture of which the entire North for four years seemed to consider would end the war, the cavalry followed along the base of the mountains which concealed Lee's army, fight- ing his cavalry at every gap in the mountains, while the main army, under Burnsides, traversed the plains of Manassas, Bull Run and Culpepper, where but little more than two months before it had met defeat in bloody battles at the hands of the enemy it was now pursuing.
The country, where rested the remains of so many brave men of both armies, and which had been marched and countermarched over so often by both armies, in the dreary, late autumn days of 1862, had much the appearance of a barren waste, and vast sec- tions of it had ceased to be the habitation of man or beast. Here and there stood a lone chimney surrounded by the charred embers of some destroyed home and an occasional straggling apple tree was all that was left to mark the civilization which in earlier and happier years marked the proud old Virginia as the mother of Presidents. Appomattox came later to vindicate the Army of the Potomac and give it the proud distinction of fighting its bloodiest battles and ending the war, but in the ides of November, 1862,
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as we marched or countermarched across those bleak plains toward Fredricksburg, the days seemed "melancholy days" indeed.
The future, full of uncertainty, was before it, and the recent past with its bloody horrors was not far behind, and if the reader can put himself in the place of such men he can come to understand that it was valor and patriotism and dearly bought discipline which still made the Army of the Potomac a terrible and splendid fighting machine when it went into winter quarters on the banks of the Rappahannock in the winter of 1862 and 1863. The cavalry was the first to appear at Falmouth on the north bank of the river and locate the enemy in his winter quarters and en- trenched on Maryes Heights surrounding the old-time city of Fredricksburg, which had once been the home of Washington and where reposed the remains of his mother.
The eastern battalion of the Third Indiana Cavalry went into camp at Belle Plains, a landing on the Potomac, a short distance below the mouth of Acquia creek, in the edge of a pine thicket, where the men built cabins of small pine logs, chinked them with mud, erected stick chimneys, used their dog tents for roofing, and in a very few days were quite comfortably situated. This situa- tion was of brief duration, for at midnight on the first of Decem- ber, 1862, the battalion was ordered to move southward fifteen miles for picket duty on the Rappahannock, in King Georges county. During this service the camp of the battalion was on the three-thousand-acre farm of Col. William Tailo, one of the finest plantations in all Virginia.
The master of this splendid estate lived in a fine country seat, located on the brow of a hill overlooking a broad expanse of fertile river-bottom lands, and on the slope of the hill towards the river were our quarters, where he housed his three hundred slaves. The battalion picketed the river for several miles in front of this plan- tation as far southward as Port Conway, the south bank of the river being picketed by the infantry of Stonewall Jackson, with
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whom we became on excellent terms. Colonel Tailo's corn cribs and wheat stacks furnished a splendid supply of forage for the horses and men, and the latter utilized an old-fashioned water mill and its slave miller, with which the farm was equipped, to convert a quantity of the Colonel's wheat into unbolted flour that made very passable biscuits.
The Colonel's son was an officer in one of Jackson's regiments across the river immediately in front of us, and the old gentleman himself made no pretense of loyalty to the Union. We enjoyed his hospitality for about two weeks until called to the battlefield of Fredricksburg on the night of December 12, 1862, where we sat in line for two days, and during which time we witnessed the bombardment of the old city and the slaughter of ten thousand brave Union men by the enemy posted on Maryes Heights, that the demand of the politicians at Washington and elsewhere for a battle might be answered. The Army of the Potomac never fought better than it did at Fredricksburg in December, 1862, but the fates were against it in the position held by the enemy, and this battle was the unfortunate ending of the country's second year of war for its existence.
The year had not been propitious for the cause of the Union, unless our vastly increased armies of better drilled soldiers, in- spired by a dogged determination to ultimately conquer, could be accepted as a favorable omen. Our great armies in the East and West had advanced into the heart of the enemy's country, fought terrible battles on his soil, and, by being outmaneuvered, com- pelled to fall back to their own frontier, and base of supplies; and the end of the year found the armies either East or West little advanced from where they had started a year before.
Both the Eastern and Western battalions of the Third Indiana Cavalry had had a similar experience. Each had been constantly engaged in the advance skirmishes of the respective armies to which they belonged, and in retreat had formed a part of the rear
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guard that held the enemy in check. Both had suffered in the loss of brave men, and their chief compensation was in their experience of sixteen months' service and the efficiency which necessarily came with such experience, and the end of this term of service found both on the outpost picket and firing line, ready to go when called or ordered.
CHAPTER II.
Neither one of the four companies, G, H, I and K, organized and mustered into the service, and designated as a part of the Third Indiana Cavalry, after the first six companies had been mustered and ordered to the Army of the Potomac, were ever permitted to join the battalion that had departed for the East. Indiana troops, as organized, prior to the creation of the Depart- ment of Kentucky had been sent in about equal proportions to Gen. Fremont in Missouri and General McClellan in Virginia, were, after the formation of the Department of Kentucky, sent to this new department as fast as mustered. And thus it was that the four companies above mentioned and designated as a part of the Third Indiana Cavalry, when ready for the field were ordered to Louisville, Kentucky, and the men of the regiment who served in the Army of the Potomac never knew anything about the others until after the close of the war, and they began to meet in regi- mental reunions. And the only men who ever joined either one of the ten companies now in the field went as recruits to fill up the depleted ranks of the various companies.
Pursuant to this policy, according to the record (War of Rebel- lion Record, Vol. VII, page 467), on December 6, 1861, Company G, under Capt. Felix Graham, became a part of Brig .- Gen. George H. Thomas's division, Army of the Ohio, doing duty at his head- quarters. Company H, commanded by Capt. Alfred Gaddis, was assigned to Gen. A. D. McCook's division for duty at his head- quarters. Company I, under Capt. Will C. Moreau, ordered to report to General Buell, Louisville, reported to General McCook at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but was ordered back to Louisville after a few days. General Nelson, commanding the Fourth Divi-
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MAJOR CHARLES LEMON-KILLED AT GETTEYSBURG.
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sion of the Army of the Ohio, at Paducah, Kentucky, on the 22d of February, 1862, reports that he had two companies of Indiana cavalry with him under Capt. Robert Klein (Vol. VII, page 654). These two companies were Companies I and K of the Third Indi- ana Cavalry, Captain Klein being captain of the latter company.
These different companies, thus assigned, served with the com- mands to which they were assigned, and were with those dif- ferent commands in their several movements in Kentucky, on Salt river, Green river and the Ohio, until our armies, numbering over one hundred thousand men, concentrated at Nashville, Tennessee, about the first of March, 1862. Under their several assignments these companies performed orderly duty, acted as scouts, pickets, and had numerous skirmishes at different times with small bodies of the enemy's cavalry that was always active on the front of our advancing armies. After the battle of Mills Springs, in which the rebel generals Payton and Zollicoffer were killed, Captain Gaddis, with one hundred picked men of Companies G and H, was sent into the rebel lines to escort and deliver the remains of these distinguished rebels to their friends. Generals Johnson and Negley, of the Union forces, with their respective staffs, accom- panied this expedition, as well as reporters from Frank Leslie's Magazine and the Cincinnati Commercial. They were within the rebel lines a day and night.
On the march to Nashville, Tennessee, on the 25th of January, 1862, Capt. Will C. Moreau, First Lieut. Tighlman Fish and Sec- ond Lieut. Oliver Childs, who were the commissioned officers of Company I, resigned, and on the 16th of February, 1862, Charles Hedrick, orderly sergeant of the company, was mustered as second lieutenant, promoted to first lieutenant, and on the 27th of Febru- ary, 1862, Argus D. Vanarsdol was made captain and Thomas B. Wilkinson second lieutenant of that company. Captain Vanarsdol resigned on the 1st of May, 1863, and Lieutenants Hedrick and Wilkinson remained officers of the company until the close of its
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term of service, the former being captain of the company at the date of its discharge.
After reaching Nashville Company I, of the Third Indiana Cavalry, was detailed as provost guards for the city, and was con- tinued in the performance of this duty until Bragg's invasion of Tennessee and Kentucky in the summer of 1862, when it was withdrawn with our other forces and accompanied the armies northward to Louisville. The other three companies continued to perform duty at the respective headquarters to which they had been assigned, scouting and picketing the various roads leading out of Nashville. In one of these scouts on the Murfreesborough pike Captain Klein with his company, K, encountered a force of General Morgan's rebel cavalry, in which Captain Klein lost two horses and one man killed.
On the 15th of March, 1862, the army at Nashville began the march that finally brought it to Pittsburg Landing and the battle- field of Shiloh, on the 6th of April, 1862. Companies G, H and K were still with the headquarters commands, which they had accompanied from the Ohio river, and performing the same kind of duty they had performed from the first. They were with their respective commands at the great battle of Shiloh, but that was an infantry and artillery battle, and cavalry only performed escort, orderly and picket duty. At Shiloh, on the 9th of April, 1862, Capt. Felix W. Graham, of Company G, resigned and returned home to become colonel of the Fifth Indiana Cavalry, and on the 17th of May, 1862, George F. Herriott, the first lieutenant of that company, became captain. On the same date Sergt. Daniel Cal- lahan was made second lieutenant, Lieut. William J. Lucas, of the same company, having been promoted from second to first lieutenant on the 30th of April, 1862.
Capt. Alfred Gaddis, of Company H, with McCook's head- quarters, in a letter dated April 10, 1862, "On the Battlefield, near Pittsburg Landing," wrote: "The battle was raging when
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we got here. We could hear the cannonading for miles, and on the army marched, leaving baggage and every incumbrance behind. When we reached the river the musketry firing had ceased and all was quiet, except the gunboats, three in number, that threw shells all night to keep the "secesh" off, for they had repulsed Grant's army of sixty-five thousand, which had got under cover of the gunboats for protection, the enemy having possession of their battlefield and camp, with all the tents and equipage.
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