USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 39
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and held their place till night. In the second assault, May 22d, a volunteer storming party of Ewing's brigade planted the flag on the Confederate works, and the Thirtieth Ohio gallantly followed, sup- ported by the Forty-seventh. Other Ohio regiments, at other points of the line, participated in the assault with credit, but none lost so heavily as the Thirtieth and Thirty-seventh on that day, or as the Thirty-seventh and Forty-seventh on the 19th.
In the siege, that continued six weeks, twenty-five regiments of Ohio infantry took part and eleven batteries of Ohio light artillery. Ohio, represented by these gallant men in the line and by Grant, Sherman and MePherson among the generals, fully shared in the glory of compelling the surrender of the Confederate garrison, July 4th. This triumph was soon followed by the fall of Port Hudson, for which, among the generals, no one was more responsible than Godfrey Weitzel, who had been appointed to West Point from Cin- cinnati, and had done more than any other man to secure the Union occupation of Louisiana. Later in the year he was on recruiting duty in Ohio.
The day of Pemberton's surrender General Lee began his prepara- tion for retreat from Gettysburg, just after the failure of his grand assault on Cemetery Ilill, July 3d. Lee had begun by defeating the Union army in Virginia, at Chancellorsville, early in May. Among the first troops to be overwhelmed by the flank attack of Stonewall Jackson was General Me Lean's brigade of four Ohio regi- ments and one Connecticut. They fought bravely, as is proved by their list of 45 killed and 350 wounded, but were driven from their line, and the same fate befell other three Ohio regiments in How- ard's corps. The other brigade in the army, largely composed of Ohioans, and commanded by Col. Charles Candy, of the Sixty-sixth, fought with more success, and lost less heavily, and the Fourth and Eighth, in a brigade under Colonel Carroll, of the latter regiment, also had honorable part in the battle. Every Ohio regiment on the field suffered loss, and among the killed was Col. Robert Reily of the Seventy-fifth.
Advancing into Pennsylvania, Lee's long column, extending from the Potomac to the Susquehanna, was touched near the center, at Gettysburg, by the advance of Reynold's corps. Instantly contract- ing, the Confederate army was hurled upon the head of the Union column, but was held at bay until corps after corps could be hurried forward into an impregnable position on which Lee wasted the flower of his army during three sweltering days, July 1st, 2d, and 3d. In this great battle, the most generally familiar, if not the most impor- tant of the war, Ohio had the Fourth and Eighth infantry regiments in Carroll's brigade of Hancock's corps ; the Twenty-fifth, Seventy- fifth and Ilundred and Seventh in Harris' brigade of Howard's corps; the Fifty-fifth and Seventy-third in Col. Orland Smith's bri-
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gade of the same corps, and the Sixty-first and Eighty-second in Sehurz's division of the same corps; the Fifth, Seventh, Twenty- ninth and Sixty-sixth in Candy's brigade of Geary's division, Slocum's corps ; the Sixth cavalry in Pleasanton's corps, and in the artillery, a very important arın in that battle, the batteries of Gibbs, Dilger, Heekman, and Norton. Carroll, Harris, Candy and Orland Smith were Ohioans in brigade command. Carroll and his men earned the special thanks of General Howard. The Seventy-third Ohio lost 21 killed and 120 wounded, and the Hundred-and-Seventh 23 killed and 111 wounded. These were the heaviest regimental losses among the Ohio troops, the total being 1,234.
It was in July, 1863, also, that Col. John T. Toland, of Cinein- anti, led a brigade of mounted men, the Thirty-fourth Ohio and Second Virginia, to Wytheville, and out the railroad communiea- tions of Richmond, but lost his life in the act.
The reader may have remarked that although Ohio had by this time enlisted over 180,000 men for the Union army, there were in the summer of 1863, only twenty-five regiments in the lines abont Vicksburg and twelve in the battle of Gettysburg. Forty-five were in Roseerans' army operating in middle Tennessee. That is to say, at the great points of contaet, where North and South were most actively contending, Ohio had about eighty regiments, which, if full, would have represented 80,000 men, but were far from full, and probably did not contain over 60,000. The other regiments had either been mustered out, as was the case with the three-months regi- ments, or they were on duty guarding the Southern territory that lay behind the western armies, and the routes along which food and ammunition were shipped to the fighting lines. This duty, alto- gether honorable, required a large part of the Union troops. Atten- tion is called to this here, that the reader may understand the truth when he encounters some statement based on total enlistments, that the North had in its armies three million men, and the South less than a million, and the war was won by hurling these three million en masse upon the lonely one. The campaigns of 1863 were fought. by contending armies in which there was not enough difference of members in line to exeuse any great general for defeat.
It was after Ohio was filled with rejoicing over Gettysburg and Vicksburg that the word came, July 8th, that the redoubtable raider, John Morgan, had reached the Ohio river and was abont to enter Indiana. On the 12th Governor Tod issued a proclamation calling out the militia, and on the next day Morgan and two thousand troopers were near the suburbs of Cincinnati, tearing along at the rate of fifty miles a day, picking up fresh horses as they went, but not taking time to do serions mischief. Feinting toward Hamilton, Morgan boldly crossed the railroads running out of Cincinnati m the suburbs of the city, passing through Glendale and feeding his
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horses in sight of Camp Dennison. There was a slight skirmish there, and a Little Miami train was thrown from the track, but Mor- gan did not tarry, and pushed on to find a crossing place into Ken- tueky, followed elosely by General Hobson, while Generals C'ox, Sturgis and Ammen and Cols. Granville Moody and Stanley Mat- thews organized the militia abont Cincinnati, and General Judah's troops were sent up the river to cut off the Confederate retreat. Of course, the utmost consternation prevailed among the people of the country that Morgan traversed. There was little danger to life, but the raiders indulged in the most unrestrained plundering. They seemed to want calico more than anything else, and every village store they passed had to contribute this commodity. Every man who could get a bolt, says the historian of Morgan's eavalry, Gen. Basil Duke, tied it to his saddle belt, only to throw it away and get a fresh one at the first opportunity. One man carried a bird eage, with three canaries in it, for two days. Another shing seven skates around his neck, though it was intensely hot weather. They pil- laged like boys robbing an orchard. Against these mirthful ma- randers fifty thousand Ohio militia actually took the field, but not half of them ever got within fifty miles of Morgan.
On the 8th, four days after leaving Camp Dennison, Morgan was at Pomeroy, where the militia annoyed him seriously, and when he reached Chester he gave his men a rest of an hour and a half that was just the margin between successful escape and disaster, so close was the pursnit. It was dark when he reached the ford at Buffing- ton's island (or Portland, Meigs county), where a little fort was held by two or three hundred militia, who evacuated in the night while Morgan waited for light before attacking. In the morning, July 19th, Hobson's cavalry, who had chased Morgan through three states, came down upon him pell-mell, and Judah, with his gunboats, occupied the river. After a brisk fight, in which the Ohio men lost the gallant old patriot, Maj. Daniel MeCook, father of two major- generals and three brigadier-generals, Morgan escaped with about twelve hundred men, and seven hundred surrendered. The chase continued. Twenty miles above Morgan got three hundred more of his men aeross, when the gunboats compelled him to hasten on with the remainder. Striking for the Muskingum, he was headed off by the militia under Runkle, and he turned toward Blennerhassett's island. Then, finding an unguarded crossing on the Muskingum above MeConnellsville, he pushed toward the Ohio above Wheeling, but was attacked at Salineville, in Columbiana county, on July 26th, by some Michigan cavalry, and lost two or three hundred of his men, and on the evening of the same day he surrendered what remained of his party to a small body of Kentucky cavalry. The non-eom- batants whose property had been taken in this famous raid were clamorous to have Morgan treated as a horse-thief, and the dashing
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Kentuckian and some of his officers were immured in cells of the Ohio penitentiary, which was not used otherwise as a military prison. Morgan took his revenge for this treatment by making a daring and successful escape in November.
Morgan's raid cost the State and individuals, it was estimated, about one million dollars. For the individual losses claims were made against the general government. A State commission, in 1564, passed upon the claims of individual losses and arrived at a total of a little over $575,000.
The great vietories of July, 1863, and the speedy discomfiture of Morgan, helped the Union party in Ohio to make a spirited cam- paign. Toward the close of it, however, there was a great combat that was dubions in its results-a defeat in battle, though the cam- paign of which it was the culmination was partly a success. The heavy loss of life among Ohio soldiers cast gloom over the State. This battle of Chickamauga, the greatest in the West, ranking with Gettysburg as the greatest of the war, was fought under the com- mand of that general of all famous generals most closely associated with Ohio, William S. Roseerans. It was his supreme test, and, unfortunately, he did not quite come up to supreme greatness, fall- ing short of that tenacity that saved his army at Murfreesboro.
Roseerans had maneuvred Bragg out of middle Tennessee, back to Chattanooga, in the summer of 1863, and in August set his army in motion to flank that point, and force Bragg down into Georgia. The main part of his army crossed the Tennessee river below Chattanooga and struggled through the mountains into Georgia south of Chatta- nooga, compelling Bragg to evacuate that city and fall back toward Atlanta, while the remainder of Rosecrans' army occupied the aban- doned town. But Bragg would not give up without a battle, and expecting reinforcements from Virginia, sought to cut off Rosecrans' columuns as they debouched in the Georgia valleys. This caused Rosecrans to hurry his scattered divisions northward, and the fight- ing began September 18th across Chickamauga creek, for possession of the roads to Chattanooga. Through the 19th and the 20th the battle raged, marked by furious assaults by the Confederate troops, and stubborn defense by the northern end of the Union line, under General Thomas, while the southern wing, kept in a state of eonfu- sion by the hurrying of troops to support Thomas, was shattered and driven back to Chattanooga. But the roads for which the battle was fought were held, and when the troops retreated, they fell back to Chattanooga, and retained that important position, which had been the objective of campaign for more than a year.
In the great battle of Chickamauga an Ohioan commanded the army, and an Ohioan, General Garfield, was chief of staff. Five of the thirteen division commanders and twelve of the thirty-six brigade commanders were Ohio officers; ton of the thirty-six batteries, and
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forty-four of the one hundred and fifty-eight regiments were from the Bnekeve state .*
Attached to general headquarters were the First battalion Ohio sharpshooters and the remnant of the gallant Tenth infantry. In Thomas' corps there were Ohio regiments in every division. In Baird's were the Second, Thirty-third and Ninety-fourth Ohio regi- ments of Seribner's brigade. In Negley's division were the Eight- eenth, in a brigade commanded by its colonel, T. R. Stanley; the Twenty-first and Seventy-fourth in Sirwell's brigade, and Marshall's and Schultz's batteries, and John Beatty commanded a brigade of Westerners. In Braman's division were the Seventeenth, Thirty- first and Thirty-eighth, in a brigade commanded by Col. John M. Connell of the Seventeenth; the Fourteenth in Croxton's brigade; the Ninth and Thirty-fifth in a brigade commanded by Col. Ferdi- nand Van Derveer; and Gary's battery. In Reynoldl's division the Hundred-and-Fifth was a part of King's brigade, and the Eleventh, Thirty-sixth and Ninety-second formed the main part of Turchin's brigade.
There were not many Ohioans in the corps commanded by Gen. Alexander MeCook: the Fifteenth and Forty-ninth of Goodspeed's battery. in the brigade commanded by Gen. Angust Willich, of Cin- cinnati, who had drilled the Ninth Ohio, but went into the war as colonel of an Indiana regiment ; the Hundred-and-First, in Carlin's brigade; the First and Ninety-third, in Baldwin's brigade; and Grosskopf's battery. But in this corps Phil Sheridan commanded a division and Gen. William H. Lytle a brigade under him.
In Crittenden's corps there was an Ohio brigade -- Sixty-fourth, Sixty-fifth, and Hundred-and-Twenty-fifth Ohio and Third Ken- tueky-commanded by Col. Charles G. Harker ; William B. Hazen, promoted to brigadier-general, commanded a brigade including the Forty-first and Hundred-and-Twenty-fourth ; the Ninetieth, Ninety- seventh, Twenty-sixth, Twenty-fourth and Sixth were scattered in other brigades, and Bradley's, Baldwin's and Cockerill's batteries were in the artillery. Horatio P. VanCleve, kinsman of Dayton pio- neers, commanded a division including the Nineteenth in a brigade led by Gen. Samuel Beatty. also the Thirteenth and Fifty-ninth and Fifty-first and Ninety-ninth, making up half the other brigades.
Gen. Gordon Granger's reserve corps, destined to win much fame in the battle, was largely Ohioans. Gen. James B. Steedman com- manded the main division of it. with the Ninety-eighth, Hundred- and-Thirteenth and Hundred-and-Twenty-first regiments the main
* In 1894 Ohio erected fifty-five monuments on this field and about Chatta- nooga to mark the places where her soldiers had fought. The two fields of battle were made a national park largely through the efforts of Henry Van- ness Boynton, of Cincinnati. in later life a distinguished journalist and war historian. who commanded the Thirty-fifth Ohio at Chickamauga and Mis- sionary Ridge.
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part of the brigade of Col. John G. Mitchell, of the Hundred-and- Thirteenth. Col. Daniel McCook commanded another brigade, including the Fifty-second and Sixty-ninth, and the Fortieth, Eighty- ninth and Aleshire's battery were part of Whitaker's brigade.
In the cavalry corps Col. Edward MeCook commanded one divi- sion, and Gen. George Crook, an Ohioan who had made himself a name in the West Virginia campaigns, the other. One brigade of cavalry, under Col. Eli Long, was made up of the First, Third and Fourth Ohio and Second Kentucky, and Newell's light artillery was with MeCook's division.
Of the part of Ohioans in the battle there is not space here to give details. They fought gallantly in every part of the field. After the wreck of the Union right, General Garfield made a famous ride under fire to encourage Thomas to keep up the fight, and in the emergency of Thomas' command, Steedman, Harker, Willich, Dan MeCook, John Beatty, Stanley, and their men, and the men of Turchin's bri- gade, earned the special commendation of the "Rock of Chicka- manga." Harker, VanDerveer, Dan McCook and T. R. Stanley, Ohio colonels, were urgently recommended for promotion. Hazen and Samuel Beatty and Willich were no less faithful under less for- tunate circumstances.
No death on the field was more lamented than that of General Lytle, the only officer of that rank who was killed. He fell at the head of his men, in a charge upon the enemy. Fifty-eight other com- missioned officers were killed, among them Col. Hiram Strong, of the Ninety-third, Lieut .- Col. Valentine Cupp, commanding the First car- alry, Col. William G. Jones, of the Thirty-sixth, and Lient .- Cols. Elhannon M. Mast and D. M. Stoughton. The Ninth regiment, which distinguished itself on the first day by capturing a battery at the point of the bayonet, lost more heavily in killed and wounded than any other Ohio regiment-48 killed and 155 wounded. The other regiments that suffered most severely were the Fourteenth, 35 killed and 167 wounded; the Twenty-sixth, 27 killed and 140 wounded : the Thirty-fifth, 21 killed and 139 wounded ; the Thirty- first, 13 killed and 134 wounded. There was not an Ohio infantry regiment on the field that was not at least decimated, to use that word in its striet meaning : not a regiment that did not lose one-tenth of its men, killed, wounded or missing. In every regiment men were unaccounted for when the official reports were made out, and their friends at home did not know for months, and some never, whether they were buried on the field, or languished, wounded and sick, in Southern prisons. The Ohio troops, if losses may be taken as the test, hore one-third of the brunt of battle, for their killed were 510 in a total of 1,657. The wounded among the Ohio soldiers were 3,052 in a total for the army of 9,756, but those reported captured or missing were not in so great proportion, only 1,346 in a total of
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4,757 .* Ont of this 1,346 many should be added to the list of killed and wounded.
The survivors of Chickamauga, besieged at Chattanooga, had the privilege of voting their opinions regarding the extraordinary polit- ical campaign at home. They and their comrades in other parts of the South east 41,467 votes for Brough and 2,288 for Vallandigham. That Vallandigham received so many votes among the soldiers is sur- prising, and that he received 187,000 votes in Ohio was yet more startling. But Brough was given a majority of over 60,000 at home, and the soldier vote raised it to 101,099, the greatest in the history of Ohio. There was hearty jollitication throughout the State. The victory was taken as an assurance of the progress of the war until the South should submit uneonditionally and it should be forever settled that a secession of states was an offense against the law of the nation, a rebellion to be erushed by force of arms.
After Chickamauga Grant was given chief command in the West. Rosecrans was supplanted by Thomas in command of the Army of the Cumberland, and in the reorganization Alexander MeCook, who was blamed in considerable degree for the misfortunes both of Mur- freesboro and Chickamanga, was relieved. The fate of Rosecrans cannot be passed without comment. If, on the field of Chickamauga, he had sent Garfield to look after the retreating troops and arrange for defense of Chattanooga, and had gone himself to Thomas' line, doubtless he would not have lost command of the army. But nothing influenced him to go to the rear but the conviction that such was his duty. It was, in fact, his proper place, for there the troops must be arranged to check pursuit. The newspapers, however, aeeused him of running away, and nothing could be said to overcome the prejudice that was excited against him. Even then, he might have held his place, if, in earlier campaigns, he had been careful in eritieising the shortcomings of other officers, like Grant and MeClellan. When he needed friends most, he found he had lost them. It must be said, also, that Charles A. Dana, special agent of the war department, had found fault with his administration in Tennessee, and by his reports of the Chickamauga campaign, one day telegraphing that the army would march to Atlanta and end the war, and a few days later deelar- ing that Bull Run had been ontdone, worked irreparable injury to Rosecrans. If he had retained command of his army, and had been reinforced at Chattanooga, he would doubtless have won the same triumph that followed and associated on the field of victory the more famous trio of Ohio soldiers, Grant, Sherman and Sheridan.
In the November battles of Lookont Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the Ohioans of the Army of the Cumberland were reinforced by the Ohioans of Howard's corps of the Army of the Potomac, and
* Official Reports.
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Candy's brigade of Geary's division of the same eastern army, as well as nine Ohio regiments of Sherman's Army of the Tennessee, from Mississippi, Gen. Ilngh Ewing commanding one of the divi- sions. More Ohioans fought together around Chattanooga than ever before in the war. Ohioans of both the Eastern and Western armies climbed together up the steep sides of Lookout, and swarmed up Mis- sionary Ridge and broke the line that had held Sherman at bay. There was comparatively little loss in the fighting on Lookout Mon- tain, and those Ohio regiments that suffered most in the campaign were in the divisions of Sheridan and Wood, under Brigadiers Wag- ner, Harker, Willich, Hazen and Sanmel Beatty, the greatest loss being 149 killed and wounded in the Ninety-seventh Ohio. These fifteen regiments lost 600 in all, seven Ohio regiments of Turehin's brigade lost 246, and the other regiments of Ohio's fifty lost enough to make up an Ohio total of 1,600, about one-third of the loss of the army. Twice as many Ohio officers were killed as of any other state-forty in all-among them Col. William R. Creighton, of the Seventh regiment ; Col. Edward H. Phelps, of the Thirty-eighth, and Majors Sanmel C. Erwin, B. F. Butterfield, Thomas Aeton and Will- iam Bireh.
At the same time Col. James W. Reilly's Ohio brigade, and several other regiments of Ohio infantry and cavalry, were campaigning in east Tennessee, where they and their comrades held Knoxville against the assault of Longstreet.
During the year 1863, fifteen thousand new men were enlisted for the army in Ohio, raising the entire number furnished by the State to something over 200,000 according to the governor's estimate. But the great event of the year in that line was the re-enlistment, for the war, of twenty thousand veterans in the field, who were the remnants of eighty Ohio regiments enlisted for three years in 1861. "It was the most inspiring aet sinee the uprising after Sumter." Col. R. B. Hayes' regiment, the Twenty-third, was the first in which the work began, and Col. E. F. Noves' regiment, the Thirty-ninth, furnished the largest number of veterans." The Sixty-sixth, the first of these regiments to return to the State after re-enlistment, on the veteran furlough of thirty days, reached Columbus December 26th, and was received with unprecedented enthusiasm. The others rapidly fol- lowed, and enjoyed for a few brief days the delights of peace and the admiration and applause of their fellow citizens. They did the State good, also, in shaming into silence what was left of the spirit of oppo- sition to the war.
Governor Tod retired from office at the beginning of 1864 with a record of a great many good things done, as well as some instances
* Reid's Ohio in the War.
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of hasty action that made him enemies." He had been very active in sending assistance to wounded soldiers, had enconraged the work of the sanitary commission and aided the government in every way possible, in none more effectually than promoting the reorganization of the state militia on a working basis as a National Guard under Adj .- Gen. Charles W. Hill.
Statistics showed that Ohio, despite all the losses in battle, was nowhere near the point of exhaustion at the close of 1563. In fact, she had a reserve of over four hundred thousand able-bodied men from which levies could be made for war, and actually thirty thou- sand more able-bodied men at home in the State in the fall of 1863 than she had in the fall of 1860. From this one may realize how the ordinary life of the State, business, manufacturing, transportation. mining, the courts and schools, went on with no visible effect from the war except the dropping out of many familiar figures of three years before. The production of petroleum was rapidly growing in importance, and in that line of exploitation of the earth's resources the foundations of some great fortunes were being laid. The rail- roads were generally in the hands of receivers, offering the oppor- tunities for purchase and consolidation and destruction of original stock that founded other great corporations.
People were able to give attention to search for the north pole as well as conquest of the southern states, and Charles Francis Hall, a modest seal-engraver of Cincinnati, returned in 1862 from a voyage in the polar regions, and met Lady Franklin at Cincinnati, after- ward receiving assistance for a second voyage, in 1864, in which he discovered the relies of Franklin's unfortunate party.
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