The road to Nashville
Minnesota in the Western war.
On Oct. 18, 1861, the 2nd Minnesota Infantry Regiment arrived in Pittsburgh heading east to join the Army of the Potomac. There, veteran William Bircher recalled, “our orders were countermanded, and instead of proceeding to Washington we were to go to Kentucky. We took transports, and with three lashed together we started on our voyage down the Ohio River.”
Minnesota raised 11 infantry regiments in the Civil War and all except the 1st would follow the 2nd into its Western theater. The deeds of the 1st Infantry in the Eastern battles are renowned, but the war in the West is relatively obscure, and so, consequently, are the deeds of the Minnesotans who fought in this crucial struggle. As the Union general William T. Sherman noted in 1861, “Whatever nation gets control of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers will control the continent.”
1862
After the federal government’s attempt to crush the Confederacy quickly failed with defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, the battlefront spread west. There was no shortage of volunteers to man the new front. By the end of 1861, Minnesota had mustered four infantry regiments of 1,000 men each, about 10 percent of its white, military-age males.
Arriving in Kentucky, the 2nd found the Confederates holding the lower half of the state. Assigned to George H. Thomas’ division of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, they set out on Jan. 1, 1862, to reclaim the state for the Union. Battle came at Mill Springs on Jan. 19. “[T]he rebels,” Bircher wrote:
…attacked the Tenth Indiana Regiment, and our regiment was quickly ordered to the scene of action. We marched about one and a half miles, through deep mud and rain, to stand support to a battery that was in a field throwing shells at the enemy. In a few minutes our regiment was ordered on to the field of battle. We marched by the right flank, up the main road, then made a left oblique movement, then regimental front, and double-quick time until we met the Tenth Indiana. Falling back — they having run out of ammunition — our regiment charged up to a rail-fence, and here occurred a hand-to-hand conflict, the rebels putting their guns through the fence from one side and our boys from the other. The smoke hung so close to the ground on account of the rain that it was impossible to see each other at times. The Ninth Ohio then made a charge along the rebel left flank and drove them from their front; and then followed one of the worst stampedes, I think, that occurred during the war.
This was the Union’s first major victory.
To their west, Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee had driven the Confederates from western Tennessee. Henry Halleck, commanding the Union armies in the West, ordered Grant south to await reinforcement by Buell before advancing on Corinth in Mississippi, which straddled the Memphis to Charleston railroad, the “vertebrae of the Confederacy.” At Pittsburg Landing on April 6–7, the Confederates surprised Grant; only Buell’s arrival saved him from defeat.
Through May, Union troops laid siege to Corinth where the 2nd was joined by the 4th and 5th Infantry, the latter the first of six raised in Minnesota during 1862. Corinth fell on May 29 and Halleck went west to become Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s chief of staff, but before leaving, he dispersed his forces, and Union momentum was lost. Buell and the 2nd went east to Chattanooga while Grant and the 4th and 5th went into western Tennessee.
The Confederates seized the initiative. Moves against Grant were repulsed at Iuka in September and Corinth in October, the 5th’s divisional commander writing that he was “happy to bear testimony to the gallant fight of this little regiment, commanded by Col. Hubbard. Few regiments on the field did more effective killing than they.” Their chaplain, Rev. John Ireland, wrote: “I am proud of the Fifth regiment, and every one here feels proud of it. Great is our renown in this army.”
The Confederates had greater initial success farther east. In August, Braxton Bragg’s army beat Buell to Chattanooga and drove north, back into Kentucky. Buell pursued. On Oct. 8, Union and Confederate armies collided at Perryville: “Not the most pleasant place we were ever in,” Bircher noted dryly. Nightfall brought stalemate, but realizing he was outnumbered, Bragg retreated. The invasion of Kentucky was defeated.
1863
With Kentucky and Tennessee secured, Union troops advanced south into the heart of the Confederacy.
Grant targeted Vicksburg, which linked Confederate forces on either side of the Mississippi. An advance in late 1862 was halted, but by February 1863, his army had reached the fortified river town; however, Grant was still unable to bring it to bear. He attempted to dig the city into submission, with Hubbard grumbling that “standing in the water up to one’s knees and delving in the mud with a spade was to their minds unsoldierly in the extreme and a mighty poor way to crush the rebellion.” When this failed, Grant conceived a new plan. If he could not take Vicksburg from the north, he would take it from the south.
Grant would become known as a pioneer of attritional warfare, but this campaign demonstrated his skill for maneuver. In April, leaving a force containing the 5th to the north, the bulk of his army, including the 4th, crossed to the west bank of the Mississippi and marched south; “A worse march no army ever made,” John B. Sanborn, the 4th’s colonel, remembered. Re-crossing to the east bank 50 miles south of Vicksburg, the troops swung northeast. The 4th, joined by the 5th, helped Grant take Jackson on May 14 and, swinging west, defeat the Confederates at Champion’s Hill two days later, sending them retreating to the defenses of Vicksburg.
On May 19, Grant tried, and failed, to take Vicksburg by force. He tried again on May 22, involving both the 4th and 5th. The 4th advanced to aid a faltering attack, but the attackers thought they were being relieved rather than reinforced and withdrew, leaving the Minnesotans exposed. This attempt failed too, and the armies settled down to siege. Finally, on July 4, the Confederates surrendered.
John H. Thurston of the 4th — which claimed to have been the first unit to march into Vicksburg and the first to plant its colors over the Warren County courthouse — wrote:
I have just been up on the hill and saw the rebels marching out and stacking their arms. Our forces are also moving in. Marched into Vicksburg, banners flying and music playing. This is the most glorious Fourth of July I ever spent. Fireworks seem to be all around the lines.
Sanborn described “a scene of life and joy and excitement such as is rarely seen on this planet.” When Port Hudson fell five days later, the Union controlled the Mississippi from the sea to Lake Itasca, cutting the Confederacy in two.
To the east, William Rosecrans replaced Buell after Perryville as commander of the renamed Army of the Cumberland. Throughout 1863, the army, including the 2nd, inched south through Tennessee, capturing Chattanooga on Sept. 9. Reinforced from the east, Bragg surprised Rosecrans on Sept. 19.
“We advanced but a short distance in the woods, which was a pine forest, before we came upon the rebel skirmishline,” Bircher wrote:
We heard on our right the heavy roll of musketry and the terrible thunder of the artillery, and it came nearer and nearer, until, in less time than it takes to describe it, we were engaged with Bragg’s army. The terrible carnage continued at intervals all day. At night we heard, from all over the field, the cry of the wounded for water and help, and the ambulance corps were doing all in their power to bring all the wounded into our lines… [O]n Sunday, the 20th, the battle was renewed with terrible slaughter on both sides. Towards noon we heard that Chittenden’s and McCook’s corps, on our right, had been driven back, and all that was left on the field, to hold in check the entire rebel army, was our corps, — Thomas’s Fourteenth. We held the enemy back until evening, in spite of his desperate assaults, and after dark we retired to Rossville.
This battle, Chickamauga, was the Confederacy’s one major victory in the West. Only the stand of Thomas — who earned the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga” and whose division contained the 2nd — prevented disaster. The regiment lost 45 killed, 103 wounded, and 14 captured; 162 casualties out of 384 men.
Grant took overall control in the West. The Army of the Cumberland regrouped at Chattanooga, was reinforced by Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee, and had Rosecrans replaced with Thomas. Bragg, though outnumbered, felt obliged to exploit his victory by laying siege to Chattanooga.
On Nov. 24 and 25, Sherman attacked the Confederate right, but he was held. Grant ordered Thomas to attack Bragg’s center along Missionary Ridge as a diversion, but instead, historian Kenneth Carley wrote, “A mass inspiration then seemed to hit 20,000 attackers at once. Without orders, and in spite of some officers’ efforts to stop them, the men continued right up the steep side of Missionary Ridge.” Jeremiah C. Donahower of the 2nd recalled: “The hill was steep and rifted, and the ascent was necessarily slow and retarded by the fire of the retiring Confederates, and from those behind the works above, but higher and still higher we moved toward those smoking cannons then almost within our grasp.”
1864
The Confederates retreated into Georgia and Joe Johnston replaced Bragg. Grant went west in March 1864, taking supreme command of all Union armies. Sherman succeeded him, resolved to “make Georgia howl.”
Sherman followed Johnston south with the 2nd and 4th, taking Atlanta in September. After a brief pursuit, the two armies did something extraordinary: They marched in opposite directions. John Bell Hood, Johnston’s replacement, marched north, hoping to drag Sherman in pursuit. Instead, Sherman sent Thomas after Hood and continued his “march to the sea.”
The 5th, 7th, 9th, and 10th regiments arrived at Nashville pursuing Hood in early December. Thomas struck on the 15th. He feinted at Hood’s right flank and hit his left with a force containing the four Minnesota regiments. Together, they comprised the largest Minnesota contingent in a major Civil War battle.
The attack succeeded after hard fighting. Storming a redoubt, the 7th came under Confederate artillery fire. Capt. Theodore G. Carter wrote:
…[T]he gunners cut their fuses so that every shell burst inside of it, and there did not seem to be 10 seconds’ interval between the discharges. Col. S. G. Hill, our brigade commander, gave the order to charge the fort on the hill, and was shot through the head the next moment. Our major heard the order and repeated it; we jumped down from the wall and, led by Col. Marshall, crossed the pike and climbed the hill, the Confederates leaving the first as we got to it.
Hood retreated to a shorter line farther south, its left resting on Shy’s Hill. The following day, Thomas again sent the Minnesotans against the Confederate left.
The artillery opened at 3 p.m. “Every man in both armies knew this meant a general charge of the Union lines and our men adjusted their cartridge boxes and prepared to spring forward at the command,” the 9th’s C. F. MacDonald wrote:
At 4 o’clock our artillery suddenly ceased firing. The signal was given and with a shout which was heard in Nashville, the men sprang from the ground and charged forward across the cornfield which lay between them and the enemy.
The 10th’s Henry Ahsenmacher wrote: “Our attack had the force of a lion, and the Rebels could do nothing but flee before us like wild sheep.” Nashville, the historian William R. Brock wrote, was “the only major battle of the war in which a Confederate army was completely broken and disorganized.” This victory effectively ended the war in the West.
Nevertheless, Dec. 16, 1864, was Minnesota’s bloodiest single day of the war, with 87 men killed taking Shy’s Hill. The four regiments’ total casualties over both days of the battle — 302 killed, wounded, or missing — comprised 10 percent of the Union’s total losses. Among those killed was Jacob Hamlin of the 7th, whose brother, Philip, had been killed the previous year at Gettysburg.
1865
The war ended in April 1865. “The heat, dust and fatigue were forgotten,” Hubbard wrote from Alabama upon hearing of the Confederate surrender:
…the weary became rested and the footsore suddenly cured. Officers and soldiers abandoned themselves to the most extravagant demonstrations of joy. Everybody cheered and shouted until they were hoarse.
The war claimed 2,571 Minnesotan lives, proportionately equal to 86,000 dead from today’s population. For every Minnesotan killed in action, another three died of disease. In June 1864, the 6th left the Minnesota-Dakota frontier for Arkansas, which Charles W. Johnson described as “a series of swamps, bayous and flat lands, overflowed from the Mississippi in high water, reeking with miasma and covered with green scum in dry weather.” Of 940 men, 72 were dead of disease and more than 600 hospitalized by November. The historian William W. Folwell noted that “the (nearly) fourscore men who died of fever at Helena were as deserving of [the country’s] gratitude as if they had fallen in battle.” So, too, were the men, like those of the 9th, confined to notorious Confederate prison camps such as Andersonville, where they suffered a death rate exceeding 60 percent.
For nine decades, the institution of slavery made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence. In the darkest chapter in this country’s history, the young state of Minnesota paid a high price in blood to save the Union and end the evil of slavery.