'Pilgrim to this shrine': Reporter's 1882 Lookout Mountain visit

A circa-1865 image of a woman in a mourning dress at Lookout Mountain. (Library of Congress)

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In the summer of 1881 and 1882, Philadelphia Times correspondent George Morgan toured Civil War battlefields in Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia. Even nearly two decades after Lee surrendered to Grant, reminders of war —  earthworks, artillery shells, bullet-scarred trees and even human remains — were not hard to find.

At a Seven Days battlefield near Richmond, Morgan visited with a farmer who had found bones and buttons of a Federal soldier while digging post holes for a fence. At Franklin, Tenn., a man who lived through the five-hour battle told Morgan of scraping "a half bushel of brains right around [his] house and the whole place was dyed with blood." At Chickamauga, site of a major Confederate victory in September 1863, he and his guide Tom found scores of empty soldier graves ... and two skulls in the woods.

During a visit to Lookout Mountain in September 1882, Morgan saw ruins of a war-time hospital, remains of Confederate breastworks and "the grave of a soldier whose bones had been found bleaching in the sun."

"Evidences of Hooker's Poetic Combat Still Found," read a headline on Morgan's Page 1 story in the Philadelphia Times on Sept. 11, 1882. Major General Joseph Hooker led Union troops to victory at Lookout Mountain — the "Battle Above the Clouds" — on Nov. 24, 1863.

A spectacular view from Lookout Mountain's summit made the visit truly memorable for Morgan, a gifted writer.

 "Many hundred feet below appeared the valley of the Chattanooga, with its smoky Pittsburg of the South, Lookout Valley, Moccasin Bend, cut by the river into the exact shape of an Indian shoe, and the Tennessee, now as narrow and as lovely as a bit of bright ribbon encircling the throat of one's ladylove," he wrote. "But there is no space to tell of the parts of a panorama worth the looking at for a whole summer."

Here's Morgan's Lookout Mountain account published in the Philadelphia Times on Sept. 11, 1882.

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Special Correspondence of The Times. 

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., September 6

As the pilgrim to this shrine of battle-song and story glances between the curtains of his bed chamber in the early morning he sees a sight worth walking through a wilderness to see — a huge pile of a mountain, ranged in oblong outline against the sky and jutting in bold mass upon one of the grand rivers of the continent. The highlands around seem jumbled in heaps and dwarfed by the bulk of this giant among them, for Lookout stands a stronghold of strongholds, overshadowing all. What perfect Mother Nature left undone for this freak of her fancy, faulty Joe Hooker made up. giving the great rock its place in poetic chronicle.

Up Lookout in the morning

With a lad of light weight to drive and mass of muscles on four legs to draw, our buggy rolled in the dust of Whiteside street out of the town to the mountain's base. There the boy, alighting, seized a bucket and doused the fore shoulders of the steed with cooling spring-water, an odd bit of grooming that seemed a prelude to heavy work. At a twist of the ribbons and a chirruping whistle the horse then took with a bound the old Summertown road that leads from the edge of Chattanooga up the eastern slope to the summit.

For a few hundred feet the ascent was easy, but after that the grade got to be steep. We had not been five minutes on the way up, indeed, before the lad drew in his reins to give the beast a chance to blow. From that first point of rest until the dead pull was over we halted at intervals of from one to six minutes. As we stood by the Three Sisters — three saplings growing less gracefully than sturdily from one stump — I took pains to watch the horse through the spectacles of a Bergh. The animal, steaming with sweat, panted as though he had chase the fox in a breakneck run over mead, mound and ditch. His quick breathing jerked the buggy in little palpitations to and fro. Lather whitened his buttocks and, as with the fat and greasy citizen of melancholy Jacques, in Arden forest:

The wretched animal heaved forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting; and the big round tears
Coursed one another down his innocent nose 
In piteous chase.
               PANORAMA: The view of the Tennessee River and Chattanooga from near
             Lookout Mountain summit. (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)

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A long pull up grade

But this Lookout Mountain horse was not only used to the work, but equal to it, and no doubt his oats were all the more toothsome on account of it. Sympathetic notions with respect to the strong fellow in harness did not keep me from catching glimpses of the fine pictures now and then revealed at breaks in the mountainside forest. We passed upward, winding around to gain a better angle of ascent, moving slowly through oaks that half screened the sky, grazing boulders whereon the person of patent pills had set his stamp and looking back now and then at the glories of the valley, getting to be away down there in the bottom of things. Brown cliffs could be seen high up on our right, even when we were near the crest and these we avoided by skirting southward, to come at last slowly to the top. In just one hour and a quarter from the time of the start the horse stuck his nose in the water-trough at the summit toll-house. When we left the valley a cloud settled down below the crest, and I was eager to get into it before the sun should scatter its folds, but, looking for it as the horse drank, I saw no sign of mist save beads of water on the grass.

Sights on the summit

In this 1864 photograph, a man shows no fear at Umbrella Rock on Lookout Mountain.
(Library of Congress)

Folks in fine duds, elderly women with curls and gold-rimmed glasses, young women in frill and feathers and their attending creatures in coats, were strolling on the lawn of a mountain hotel near by -- for several hundred loiterers have, passed the summer at resorts on the summit. I was surprised, moreover, to find that a long line of farms stretch along the Lookout crest southward thirty miles or more. All around one may see wonderful objects moulded by the great hand that built the hill itself. A party of nice girls in real old rebel jib-bonnets could have told me, if they had stopped to talk, how they had just been over at Saddle Rock for a ride on the back of the giant steed; of Umbrella Rock, so built in the upheaval of things that a party may remain comfortable under it even should it rain pitchforks; of Pulpit Rock, whereof the only orator is the chattering squirrel, preaching his little sermon to a world below; of the City of Stone; or, last of all, of that cliff from which a young Pennsylvanian fell headlong to death, bedewing his shroud of honorable blue with his own hearts red.

Pulpit Rock, one of the many locations on Lookout Mountain popular for photography. This is
a 19th-century image. 

Earthworks across the crest

This whole northern end of Lookout is as full of Dame Nature's curious finger marks as it is free from that which I expected to find -- heel prints of Hooker's grand battle above the clouds. The Old Man of the Mountain, with forehead, eyes, nose and chin of stone, not to mention a harder cheek than Hubbell's, is here. One may sip sweet spring water as he looks at a natural bridge, or talks by natural telephone through the heart of an immense rock, and a cataract leaping down the mountain offers solace to the soul; but evidences of the fight are as scarce as dead men on an Egyptian battlefield. Still, some war relics do exist here. At the natural City of Rocks I found the ruins of the hospital put up by General [George] Thomas, when General [John] King, with four regiments, was encamped at that point; and beyond the ruins of Summertown, once a famous Southern resort, we struck a strong line of Confederate earthworks. This line remains about as it was when General [Carter] Stevenson, whom  Hooker drove from the mountain, held it.

Widow Whiteside's big dog

Hiding a few hundred yards further we suddenly came to a closed gate. A bull-dog with jowls as heavy as his ears and fangs seemingly as strong as Vulcan's pincers met us, for the wealthy Widow Whiteside takes toll of all persons who pass within. She owned this part of the mountain at the time of the battle and her revenue thus gained on the crest, with that flowing in from lunch property in Chattanooga, makes her income larger than that of any other person in the Chattanooga corner of Tennessee. No one may pass the bull-dog and the gate without flipping a quarter to the mulatto girl who soon appeared, nor by some arrangement can any teams except those from a certain livery stable pass to the Point, the very gem of the mountain, a minute's ride beyond.

A picture of glories

The spectacular view from near the summit of Lookout Mountain.

When we hitched the horse in a grove at the Point and walked out upon the extreme cliff the sight was found to be worth a cartload of quarters. All around the sky-line were mountains, far off and hazy — the peaks of the Carolina, Kentucky's blue ridges, the great knobs of Georgia, Alabama's lines of hills and the nearer highlands of Tennessee. Many hundred feet below appeared the valley of the Chattanooga, with its smoky Pittsburg of the South, Lookout Valley, Moccasin Bend, cut by the river into the exact shape of an Indian shoe, and the Tennessee, now as narrow and as lovely as a bit of bright ribbon encircling the throat of one's ladylove. But there is no space to tell of the parts of a panorama worth the looking at for a whole summer. What I was bound by business to regard particularly was nearer than the valleys and the river, the Craven plateau, upon which it seemed as though I might pitch a walnut, for it was on the mountain side a few hundred feet below the cliff upon which I stood. There the battle among the clouds was fought, if such a battle there was.

The fighting was done

Robert Cravens house, the vortex of the Battle of Lookout Mountain on Nov. 29, 1863. The house 
was destroyed during the battle and rebuilt.

It was upon the level ledge, at Craven's place, whither I went in the afternoon, that the main action came about, and it is here that most of the signs of the fight are to be found. I was in ill-luck as to meeting the aged owner of the high-land farm, nor was there any person around able to give me as good an understanding of the place as I hoped to get. The darkey, who had displaced the sleepy boy of the morning ascent, knew a great deal worth telling, though, and told well what be did know. Mr. Craven, who was on the ground in the midst of the attack, has said that he gathered nearly two thousand pounds of iron and lead on his place after the storm had swept by. Such relics are yet to be picked up, while the stone breastworks stand just about as they did when [Confederate General Edward] Walthal abandoned them to get out of Hooker's way. The guide showed me the grave of a soldier whose bones had been found bleaching in the sun on the mountain side, and I did not fail to see a curious alpenstock, made from a staff and bayonet and used in clambering up the slope.

Present-day view of the remains of  Confederate stone breastworks in the woods near the Cravens house.

Sharp briar's thunder

Back among the years when the greenwood had more magnolias and fewer axe-marks, when our grandfathers sweetened their Sundays with soft kisses and hard cider, with every goose a swan and every lass a queen, a certain old Cherokee lived in a cabin on the Lookout Summit. Sharp Briar had seen enough of the ways of the pale face to want his children to be civilized, and yet he loved to thrill them with stories of the chase, the bite of the arrow, the leap from the precipice and the warm blood of the buck dripping into pools at the loot  of the cliff. So it happened that one day Chief John Ross heard Sharp Briar tell the voting men how thunder had hurled an oak from the mountain top clear into the Tennessee, two miles below.

Union General Joseph Hooker
led the attack on Lookout Mountain.
(Library of Congress)

"Brother," said Ross, whose English was as pure as his heart, "thunder does no harm; the white fire that flies ahead kills and the noise is as empty as the head of a Seminole."

"Hoch!" grunted the old man; "No, killin' thunder?"

"No: thunder does not kill."

 Sharp Briar was loth to take such science home to his children, nor did he ever reach them with it, for he was dashed that night from Sunset Rock by a thunderbolt that shook the mighty mountain. In like manner was poor old Joe Hooker taken back. I thought, as 1 sat on the porch of the little house at the Point and took the yarn in at one ear not to let it out at the other.

The poetic battle of the war

Here had Hooker fought his battle with the clouds around him -- an action in mid-air, a fierce combat even hard by the very archway of the upper world -- and prosy Grant, with the glory of a dozen victories reflected from his shining blade, came to say that no battle ever was fought on Lookout -- that there was no "killing thunder" in that air on the 24th of November, 1863. I beg to put it down in black and white, that even though the fight was a heavy skirmish only, it is likely to be written about even above the grimness of Vicksburg, the havoc of Spottsylvania or the masterly work on the Appomattox. Hooker's men pressed into dark finds of mist, breasted hidden foes, took iron hail thundered down in battle smoke from batteries overhead, and in the midst of satanic uproar won the great stronghold.

G.M.

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Heartache on hallowed ground: Parker's Crossroads Stop No. 7

This large slab marks the burial site for Union soldiers who died at the Battle of Parker's Cross Roads. 
Nearly  all the remains were exhumed for re-burial elsewhere two years after the Civil War.
(CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

Interstate 40 slices through the heart of the Parker's Crossroads (Tenn.) battlefield.

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A massive highway billboard for the Bucksnort Inn ("Remodeled, Clean Rooms, Guaranteed!") stands 200 yards from where Confederate Lt. Colonel Thomas Alonzo Napier was mortally wounded at the Battle of Parker's Crossroads. Two brown Porta-Potties sit paces from the spot the 25-year-old officer took a bullet as he leaped atop a split-rail fence on New Year's Eve 1862.

Bucksnort Inn billboard near hallowed ground
at Parker's Crossroads, 100 miles west of Nashville.

In the near distance, across six-lane Interstate 40, which long ago cruelly sliced through the heart of  Tennessee hallowed ground, we see the usual modern schlock: McDonald's, Knight's Inn ($36.99 a room) and an Exxon service station. Another large billboard nearby touts Loretta Lynn's Kitchen in historic Williamson. "Visit the Legend," it proclaims. On a nondescript, one-story building on Federal Lane, a tattered sign denotes the Parker's Crossroads Apostolic Church.

Welcome to Tour Stop No. 7, the final stop on your self-guided Parker's Crossroads battlefield tour. The large parking lot is nearly empty on this chilly winter day.

A marker denotes spot where 25-year-old Confederate officer
Thomas Alonzo Napier was mortally wounded.

On Dec. 31, 1862, Colonel Cyrus L. Dunham's Midwesterners -- soldiers from Indiana, Illinois and Indiana -- desperately clung to their position here for two hours  behind a split-rail fence. "A shell hit the fence near which I stood," 50th Indiana Private Joseph Hotz wrote his wife, "and the rail struck me down." He survived. At least 30 of his comrades did not. Confederates, including cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, won the day.

The Yankees who fell in the vicious fight were buried in small cemetery at the east end of the Union line. Among them probably were Lieutenant Pleasant L. Bristow, the married father of boys named Lowell, 3, and Samuel, three months, and fellow Illinoians Henry Opperman, Reuben Fletcher and Ernst Russell. The Union remains were exhumed two years after the war for reburial in a national cemetery in Corinth, Miss. Two decades ago, an archaeological excavation uncovered fragments of another poor soul, apparently forgotten.

A large, gray-granite slab in a strip of woods denotes the location of the graveyard. We try to imagine the scene on the cold night here 156 years ago. Spade meets earth. A body tossed into a trench. Perhaps a short prayer recited, a few tears shed. Or were they numb to it all?  Then the ugly roar of interstate traffic tips us back into the 21st century.

A scrawny, brown fox darts into the brush. We're off, too. A foot in the present, but one stuck in the past.

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Skulls, scarred trees: A reporter's 1882 visit to Chickamauga

Confederates advance through the woods at Chickamauga. (Alfred Waud | Library of Congress)

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As Philadelphia Times correspondent George Morgan walked through the bullet-scarred woods at Chickamauga, his guide told him to look down. The sight shocked him.

" I saw a skull as yellow as the stones around ...," Morgan wrote in a lengthy story about his visit to the battlefield in northwestern Georgia in the summer of 1882. "The round thing of bone, with unsightly sockets and the pitiful seeming of poor Yorick's skull, lay in a sort of hollow, with the green leaves of plantain for a pillow."

Rib bones lay nearby, more remains of a soldier who died at Chickamauga in September 1863.

"The guide obligingly offered to show me the legs  which having brought the poor devil hither failed to take him away," Morgan wrote, "but I had seen enough."

Reminders of the horrific battle appeared elsewhere, too.  On the slopes of a hill, the men found scores of large holes in the ground -- the temporary graves of soldiers.  Elsewhere, Morgan and Tom discovered burial trenches "that looked as though they must have contained whole companies."

Below is Morgan's Chickamauga visit story published in the Philadelphia Times on Sept. 4, 1882. (The correspondent's stories about his visits to the Franklin, Tenn., and Seven Days battlefields also are posted to my blog.)

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Special Correspondence of The Times

THE CREEK OF DEATH, September 1

When one unfolds his paper here on Chickamauga field and glances at the cable news, those absurd little dog-fights in Egypt seem as much like nothing as the letter 0 without the rim. "General Sir Garnet Wolseley reports the loss of five men killed," runs one dispatch descriptive of a battle, and as I put that line mentally in contrast with the grisly work and grand sweep of death here, there comes to mind the remark of Douglas Jerrold at the sight of a very tall woman waltzing with a Tom Thumb of a man. "Heigho!" said the wit, "there goes the mile-stone dancing with the mile." In this valley two fierce armies met in such shock of battle that men enough to people a city fell, never again to see the sun. More than five thousand died on the field and five thousand times Sir Garnet's five went, with cracked crowns, limping away.

The first glimpse at rare ground

VIDEO: IN THE FOOTSTEPS ... of Confederate Brigadier General James Deshler’s troops. Hit by a shell in the chest, Deshler was killed at Chickamauga on Sept. 20, 1863 — the pyramid monument of cannon balls marks the approximate spot.

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With Lookout Mountain, dark and cloud-capped, on his right, and the long, low line of Missionary Ridge on his left, the visitor finds the road of seven miles from Chattanooga hither bordered with most pleasing objects. I was surprised when Tom whipped his horse from the Rossville pike into a by-way, remarking as he snapped his lash among the bushes: "Heah we am, an' we come a-kitin'; put nigh ez fas' ez I kited way from heah 'bout twenty yeah back."

"Were you here during the battle?"

"Deed I was! Coase I diden' know nuffin, ' furr I was jess a youug' un den."

"A kid?"

"Dat's hit, dat's hit, boss; an' ef ye specs me to sling in a tech ob dat ar Yankee slang I kin let ye know dat it wa'n't no picnic 'bout dat time, nudder. 'Twan't no picnic furr a cent, nur no hay-copper, nudder. By de great ho'n spoon, dat battle wuz a time to snatch de debbel hisself bald-headed."

"Must have been hot?"

"Hot! Did ye ebber say 'scat' to a wild-cat, wid his claws a-clawin' yer wool? Nebber seed sich a hot time!"

"Tom, I'm afraid you're piling it on."

 The Game of Pow and Zip

Union Colonel Edward King, Army of the Cumberland's II Brigade commander, was killed here.

 "Wish I mout drap stone dead ont'n dis buggy ef  'taint so, ebbery wo'd ob hit," protested the darkey, slapping his knee with his palm; "doan ye see, boss, I was Moss' sarvent boy, saddled his hoss an' done dem kind o' things, lookin' out fur pone bread all do time. You know dat simmon tree we pass wile ago? Dat day Moss an' me was dar restin' when I heah suppin go 'pow!'" and Tom blew the last word from his puckered lips so that they cracked very much like the report of a rifle.

"Something go 'pow ?' "

"Dat's her," he went on, growing a bit excited, his arms sawing the air at every word and his eyeballs showing their whites at every exclamation; "dat's hit. I up an' says, kind o' peert like: 'Moss, doan' ye heah dat ? Dem's Yanks.' 'O no, yo dam little nig,' says he; 'wat yo skeered 'bout?' Den sho come agin 'p-o-w! p-o-w! p-o-w !' right slow like, an' den, by golly! ez quick ez a whissel, 'zip! zip! zip!' Git out o' heah! Git ont !' says Moss, hoppin' up in his saddle. 'Pow! zip! pow! zip! zip!' Bress de lan', honey, de woods uz ez full ob zips ez de nigger church down at Ha'd Scrabble am ob shiners, comin' quickern yo co'd wink, an' ebery zip was a Yankee bullet!"

"You got out?"

"Spee so, spee so, an' Moss he got out wid a hole in his boss' belly-band. Dat was de startin' ob de battle. Now, boss," he continued, taking the tone of the guide once more, "ef ye'll git out ob de buggy I'll show ye suppin' show  -- show ye suppin' wuff seein'."

In the Blackjack Woods

                     PANORAMA: The wooded terrain of the Chickamauga battlefield. 
                                       (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)

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We were riding through flat woods, the larger trees of which had been much cut up on the 19th of September, the first day of the battle. Here had occurred a series of brilliant charges and counter-charges, none of any account except that in them hundreds were slain. Most of the trees are blackjacks, which, though so hard that lightning itself scarcely can crack the wood, bear countless scars and axe-marks. The scars were made by bullets Yankee lead on one side and rebel lead on the opposite bark. The axe-marks were caused by Chattanooga darkies, who from the blackjacks and among the leaves picked thousands of pounds of valuable metal. Tom hitched his horse to a sapling in silence. Then he led the way between trees until he came to an oak as big arouud as the body of Senator David Davis. In the bark, about five feet from the roots, was a wound such as might have been made by the see-sawing of a limb swayed in the storm's fitful mood.

Tom's private corpse

In the woods of Chickamauga, Tom the Guide pointed out the skull of a soldier to the reporter. Later,
 they found another one. Above, a Civil War soldier's skull shows the effects of a bullet wound.
(Library of Congress)

"Well, Tom, that's nothing."

"Drap yer eye, sah!"

Looking down I saw a skull as yellow as the stones around, for one of which in approaching the tree I had mistaken it. The round thing of bone, with unsightly sockets and the pitiful seeming of poor Yorick's skull, lay in a sort of hollow, with the green leaves of plantain for a pillow. Lifting a broad, flat stone Tom brought to light an array of ribs still held evenly in shape like hoops around a shattered keg. The guide obligingly offered to show me the legs, which having brought the poor devil hither failed to take him away; but I had seen enough, and he fell to chatting of the merits of that particular lot of bones. He found them, he explained, while chipping a bullet from the tree a year or so ago. The bullet probably killed the soldier and there he remained and yet remains except his teeth and one jaw- bone. The latter was carried away by a son of General Breckinridge and the teeth have been picked out one by one as relics. Recently a party of women went to the place and one of them fainted at the sight.

"This seems to be your private corpse, Tom."

"Yes, sah; I'se a -- a -- what word's dat I heah 'em usin' ober in Chattanooger? Moner-- ist, or suppin."

"Monopolist."

"Monoperlis; dat's hit. I'se a monoperlis," and Tom almost shook his teeth out in loud guffaws as he chucked the skull into the hollow and moved on ahead.

What is apt to startle one

But Tom's bonanza was not the only object of the kind found in our tramp. Within a hundred yards of the first skull we saw another as round and as brown as a rusty cannon ball. A bit beyond we came to a grave where rain-washed clods failed to do their duty. Not long ago, when this grave was discovered, a letter was sent to the keeper of the nearest Federal Cemetery letting him know about it, In response a government officer came up from Atlanta and visited the grave. Reaching his hand down among the leaves he drew out a button marked " C. S. A."

"That settles it," he said and returned to Atlanta without his bag of bones.

The Union lad has his green coverlet trimmed with daisies, but the darling of his Southern mother sleeps among the brown briars on the borders of the wilderness. That it is a thumb's length only from the solemn to the grotesque was thought of when, leaving the woods for our buggy, we came upon a smooth oak board holding above a mound this inscription:

 3 or 4
Kentuckyans
C.S A 
are burred hear. 

Desolation at the field's centre

A trot of ten minutes took us out of the flat woods and along a level road with trees bordering to the Widow Glenn's place, which is the centre of the battle-field. Here [William] Rosecrans had his headquarters and here on the 20th of September, the great day of the great battle, some heavy fighting was done. The house stood on the crest of a hill, as high as any round about, and with his glass Rosecrans could see along both of his wings. As he looked to the east he could catch a glimpse of the yellow Chickamauga winding between low banks. More than two miles in front of him was [Braxton] Bragg's line of 70,000 men, there being among them [James] Longstreet and his fresh legion from Virginia. As at Murfreesboro [Alexander] McCook was on the right, and as at Murfreesboro McCook was driven in utter rout. But here Crittenden went with McCook. The whole right wing was swept from the field. Officers and men ran alike, Rosecrans with them, and some of the officers did not stop until they got to Chattanooga. It is no use to mince the meat of this issue, for it is as plain as the nose on one's face that here Rosecrans, McCook, [Thomas] Crittenden, Davis, Sheridan -- even Phil, the hero of the Winchester ride -- all got out of the way all except the admirable Lytle, whose lips were dumb iu death.

Now the place is desolate. Where the fine old farm house stood are piles of stone overgrown with horse-weed. I cast a stone into the old well to hear it go "ker-chug," but no sound came from the dark depth. The mouth of the well is half hidden in rank grass, and the rotting curb itself is half choked with the what-not of a wrecked habitation. The few garden trees that remain bear sweet peaches, and some walnuts fit to crack hang here and there, but these small evidences of former thrift serve to sadden the scenes they suggest.

The Rock of Chickamauga

Union General George Thomas,  the
 "Rock of Chickamauga."
(Library of Congress)

When half the grand army was in rout, the other half drew itself around the "Rock of Chickamauga" and withstood as wild a storm as ever split to shreds the sails of a ship of state. With Rosecrans gone [George] Thomas took foothold on the eminence known in books as Horseshoe Ridge," just beyond the Dyer house and a little out of eye-shot of the Glenn place.

I would like to picture this hill in all its outlines if I were able -- would like to make at this point a sort of red-letter mark -- for long after readers and writer are dead and gone the hill will be a place of pilgrimage, a Mecca for lovers of the brave. Now it carries its wild covering of ages, but the generations yet to spring will clear it and crown it while cannons thunder. From its crest will be lifted a pillar of stone, and thereon will stand the image of the hero. On his front pressed the enemy, on his left thousands stormed, and, like the incoming of mighty waves, line after line rolled against his right. But there Thomas stood, almost surrounded, yet with no thought of surrender, calm in the midst of the thrust, the parry, the hoarse call of man to man, the rattle of many muskets, tho roar from huge logs of iron too hot to touch, smoke that screened and reddened the September sun -- firm in the whirlpool of battle.

Sights on the famous hill

Snodgrass Hill, where George Thomas made his famous stand. (Library of Congress)

Rhetoric is rhetoric and fact is fact, and so I hasten to tell the reader that this hill with a history is known locally as Snodgrass' hill. As the worshipful knight in armor of gold walks in the same footpath as the clown with cap and bells, so the words " Snodgrass" and "the Rock of Chickamauga" walk the same chalk line of fame. Guided by Mr. Dyer I climbed the slope on the east to the spot where General Thomas stood in the thick of the battle. The whole surface of the hill is well salted and peppered with bits of flint. Growing out of the gravel are trees of several kinds -- black jack, black oak, hickory, pine and sassafras -- and the devil's shoe-string, with the roots of which one could securely bind a Samson, is found here and there among the vines. Most of the old trees are scarred and chipped.

The Union defenders of the hill fired down the slope, and while their bullets remain on one side of a tree the bullets of the enemy may be dug from the other. Hundreds of scooped-out places, like such as are, made by wallowing swine, are found on the slopes by the score. All such sinks once contained dead men, but the bones have been shoveled out to fill the cemeteries. In some places we came across burial trenches that looked as though they must have contained whole companies, so long, deep and wide do they yawn even in these days of peace when the partridge flutes among them and the whippoorwill whistles above. Three or four little grave mounds, whereof the reddish soil seemed newly turned, were objects of surprise to me until Mr. Dyer coming up explained that here on the top of the hill was the unfenced burying ground of the Snodgrass family. These are not the only undisturbed graves, for on one of the spurs of the Horseshoe is a pit containing the bodies of a dozen Union soldiers, and in the timber just at the foot of the western slope thirteen Confederate soldiers of the Fifth Kentucky lie in a row.

On the Creek of Death

Lee and Gordon's Mills on the Chickamauga battlefield. (National Archives)

It was hard to leave the great rock of the battle-field, but bruised feet and tired legs drifted of their own accord down the main slope to the buggy. Then with Tom once more at the reins we drove along several roads and came to the Chickamauga at the noted Lee and Gordon's mills. One of the millers dusted his coat as he told me why the Cherokees, whom events have made prophetic, named the narrow red stream dashing past us "Chickamauga" or, as the Cherokee Chief John Ross translated the phrase, " the creek of death."

Deer feeding in the coves of the stream would die, colts milking their creek fed mothers would turn their little hoofs to the daisies and even men who drank milk produced along the stream would suffer death. "It is 'milk-sick,' "said the miller, "more than that I don't know; the Kentucky Legislature once offered $10,000 to anyone who would get at the cause of the disease -- whether the ailing was caused by mineral or vegetable matter -- but no one knew or knows. The Cherokees suffered from it on this creek and named the stream the Chickamauga."

So passed my fancy that I had stumbled upon a legendary prophecy fulfilled. Plain facts were as cold as the water that hurried along to the Tennessee, and in a double sense it must be set down that this drain of a great battle-field is "the creek ot death."

G.M.

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Bones, rusty gun barrels: 1881 tour of Seven Days battlefields

Remains of soldiers on Gaines' Mill battlefield in 1865. Sixteen years later, soldier remains still were found
on the Seven Days battlefields. (Library of Congress | CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

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In the summer of 1881, Philadelphia Times correspondent George Morgan toured the Seven Days battlefields near Richmond. Nineteen years after Robert E. Lee chased George McClellan's Army of the Potomac from the gates of the Confederate capital, evidence of war was not hard to find.

Rusty gun barrels, old canteens, traces of earthworks, unexploded artillery shells and the outlines of parapets were easily found. In his Page 1 account, Morgan also told of a farmer who discovered human remains while digging post holes for a fence.

"He felt his spade grate against something hard and a moment later he cast up a skull," Morgan wrote. "With more of a twitching of his fingers than Hamlet's first grave-digger felt, Swiffer stooped, scratched away the sand and disclosed a complete skeleton, which, from bits of blue and brass buttons about it, was pronounced to be that of a Federal soldier."

The farmer placed the bones and skull in a barrel for re-burial at Cold Harbor National Cemetery, "where the forgotten brave was given decent though not 'Christian burial' among his unknown fellows."

Here's the account of Morgan's trip through Virginia, published in the Philadelphia Times on July 25, 1881:

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Special Correspondence of The Times 

RICHMOND, July 22

Present-day view of Gaines' Mill (Va.) battlefield visited by reporter George Morgan in 1881.

Shortly after sunrise on Monday morning I was searching among some shell-shattered fragments of a wall at Gaines' Mill when a man with an empty sleeve crawled out of a cart that had just come in from the New Cold Harbor road. He was a hearty fellow of forty, or thereabouts, and as he limped towards the blacksmith shop I saw that with his one arm he was swinging a handful of gun-barrels as though they had been so many sticks of reed.

"Hello, there!" he said gruffly to the man at the forge, "want ye to make me some shoes for my hoss."

"What out'n?" asked the busy blacksmith, whose quick-falling strokes upon a red-hot rod gave out thud upon thud and shook the shop in which he was beginning his toilsome day.

"Yankee guns," said the newcomer.

" Hist!" whispered the blacksmith; "here's a Northern man lookin' at the battle-ground."

But Storekeeper Tucker, with a quickness of perception noticeable in both Federal and Confederate veterans, felt that no Northerner in his senses would care a snap whether he should be called "Yankee" or " Union man," and, shaking hands, he cheerily explained the incident of the guns. They had been picked up from various parts of the battle-field and brought to him at his New Cold Harbor store, a half mile to the east. He had long ago learned that the rusty barrels could be turned by heat and hammering into what he called "horse shoes of the best kind" and time and again had he shod his fat roadster with iron once used in the death grapple in the Chickahominy hollows.

In his business since the war he has dealt not only in old guns, but he has bought and sold lead, leather and brass, gathered from the woods by little darkeys in search of dimes. I found him to be full of war stories and though not exactly full to the chin with war relics he yet carried a minie bail in his pelvis and a piece of shell in his foot. He was one of [George] Pickett's men who beat against the stone wall at Gettysburg, and in the charge. almost at the same moment, his arm was torn off by a round shot, his body pierced by a ball and his heel ripped open by a third missile. He dropped for dead upon the carpet of clover, with most of his regiment around him, but to his own astonishment he was restored to robust health.

In search of the Chickahominy

Military bridge over Chickahominy River in June 1862. (Library of Congress)

At daybreak on that day I had come out from Richmond on the New Bridge road, with the idea of leaving behind the sands and swamps ot the Chickahominy before the sun should become troublesome. In the course of the ride I had just begun to wonder where in the world the Chickahominy could be when a bit of a log hut, brown from a coating of clay, presented itself by the roadside, not a dozen steps from the buggy. A number of pickaninnies in free-and- easy garb were playing in front of the door, and when I asked how much longer it would be before I should strike the Chickahominy a little wool-top stuck his fist in his mouth and grunted: "Do'an kno' sah."

"You don't know how far it is to the Chickahominy!"

"No, sah, do'an kno'; fibe mile, spec."

But a few turns of the wheels down a ravine brought me to a bridge under which ran a thin stream. The bed of the stream was wide and swampy. A score of steps beyond the first bridge was a second and so a little ways further was a third, all alike, narrow, sand-covered and each arching a rivulet. Damp air came from the grass below, but arrows of sunshine were darting among the treetops overhead. An old darkey was crossing the third bridge and to him I addressed the query: "How much further to the Chickahominy?"

"How much fudder ter de Chikkyhomny? Bess yo' soul, honey, dis am de Chikkyhomny? Bess yo' soul, honey, dis am de Chikkyhomny 'neef our berry feet. Axed de chillun up dar, did yo? Oh, dey's my chillun, but dey take arter dere mam en do'an kno' nuffin. Dey calls dis do 'Chick' fur sho't en all de homny day kno' bout am de homny dey git frum de pot, sho' now."

And the old fellow chuckled while I whipped up the sand hill, jogged along the edge of a field of peanuts and came to Duane's branch, on the eastern bank of which nestles the hamlet of Gaines' Mill.

A sandy battle-ground

The place is made up of a grist mill, a blacksmith and wheelwright shop and a few houses. It is at the foot of a bluff that holds an oak woods up towards the east and shelters the few people there, not only from the eastern storms, but from the summer's heat. The heavy wooden water-wheel turns all day long, casting white spray into the air, and above its roar comes the rasping sound of the carpenter's saw and the ring of the blacksmith's hammer. The one-armed rebel explained that the ruined wall once enclosed the mill and that it was knocked to pieces during the cannonading from Robertson's position. Just here there are no other marks of battle, but when we crossed several sandy, poor-looking fields and approached a ridge on the northern bank of the Chickahominy we saw rotting trees, in some of which there were unexploded shells, and here and there in the woods we kicked over old canteens.

The Federal soldier's remains the farmer found
in 1881 were re-buried at the national cemetery
at Cold Harbor, Va. Here is the grave
of an unknown Union soldier there.

Slight traces of [George] Morrell's fortifications, on the Federal left, may be seen a half mile south of the mill. It was against those fortifications, which are on a crest, that [Stonewall] Jackson hurled [William] Whiting's division. The space across which that division charged with yells that were caught by [Fitz John] Porter's ear is now grown up in pines, at the roots of which are many bones. In removing the bodies for interment in the Richmond cemeteries after the war the work was roughly done, cadavers being thrust into carts much as a baggage -- man would toss a trunk, and in this way the small finger-bones and bones of the feet were left scattered in the ruts.

One day last week Farmer Swiffer was digging post-holes in a tract of land near where [Henry] Slocum held the Union right. He felt his spade grate against something hard and a moment later he cast up a skull. With more of a twitching of his fingers than Hamlet's first grave-digger felt, Swiffer stooped, scratched away the sand and disclosed a complete skeleton, which, from bits of blue and brass buttons about it, was pronounced to be that of a Federal soldier. The farmer got a barrel from his house and jamming the mouldering thing in took it to the Cold Harbor Cemetery, where the forgotten brave was given decent though not "Christian burial" among his unknown fellows.

What a strong-armed Sumner left

Federal wounded at Savage's Station, Va., on June 30, 1862. (Library of Congress)

We passed an hour in search of marks of [Edwin] Sumner's upper bridge across the Chickahominy and at last were able to locate it by marks in the oaks nearby and by some debris that was floated during a flood into the forks of a huge oak. A by-road took me thence out of the Chickahominy lowland to Sumner's road, between the lower bridge and Savage's Station. This battlefield, where Sumner held the enemy in check until the rest of the army of 120,000 men had slipped through White Oak Swamp on the bloody march to Malvern, now shows more positively than any other Peninsular point yet visited the hand of the progressive land-owner.

What was then the hotly-contested Whitesides' farm is now in a high state of cultivation and the Allen brothers have grafted their enterprise upon the growing community. Considerable business is done at the station on the Richmond and York Railroad and things appear to be brisk enough roundabout. The outlines of a parapet, with embrasures clearly marked, may be seen among some cedars back of the Allen house and several rifle pits containing the bodies of Confederate soldiers are pointed out to the visitor. Stopping at a store on the Quaker road I began to ask the proprietor questions about the country roundabout, adding "You've lots of history down this way." The storekeeper said that very often every battle-field in the vicinity happened to be represented at the same time by purchasers in the store.

"Maybe it's so out on the porch now," he said, leading the way to a group of a dozen men who were eating apples in the shade.

"McCarthy," said the storekeeper to a lad whose boot-heels were armed with spurs, "where are you from ?"

"Seven Pines," replied the boy."

And you, Johnson?"

"Malvern Hill," said a tall man with freckled nose and long goatee.

"And you, Bill?"

" Frazier's Farm, and you know it."

"Yes, but I was seeing how many battle-fields we have represented here. Your place is at Savage's, isn't it, Mr. Farra"

"Savage's," assented Mr. Farra.

"And yours, Abram?"

"I'so from Colo Habo'h, boss," said the darkey modestly, from his seat in the corner.

Federal soldiers at the Seven Pines (Va.) battlefield in June 1862. (Library of Congress)

An incident like this, which could have happened only at noon or in the evening when the people around come to the store for various articles, puts it more forcibly to the visitor than anything else can that he is upon ground every inch of which was fought over in those desperate seven days from the 25th of June to the 1st of July, nineteen years ago. Holding myself especially fortunate that I should be able to clink glasses at once with men from Malvern, from Savage's, from Seven Pines, from Cold Harbor and from Frazier's Farm, I kept on down the road through White Oak Swamp to the last-named field. The narrow defile through the swamp is bordered by oaks, pines, gum trees and chinkapin bushes, frequently canopied with grapevines and the climbing creepers of wet woods. Being here, it is no longer hard to understand why, with all his dash and vim, Jackson couldn't get at McClellan's rear, and it is easy also to fancy how the man of the valley chafed inwardly until his heartstrings were sore.

 And, moreover, while Jackson's feet were tangled in the swamp there came from the high land beyond such sounds of strife that Lee, new in command himself, fretted at the delay. Over beyond the tops of the white oaks [George] McCall's Pennsylvanians were gun to gun with [James] Longstreet's Alabama troops and bayonets were locked fiercely in the struggle. "I saw skulls crushed by the heavy blow of the butt of the musket," said McCall, and there is no doubt that in this pine thicket through which I have just passed are bodies dear to mothers on the Susquehanna and the Delaware. This thicket and the surrounding fields of corn make up the battle-ground of Frazier's Farm, or Glendale, or New Market road, but there is little except memory to busy the mind with and I push on towards the James, now winding between its bluffs in sight to the south.

A climb up Malvern Hill

On July 1, 1862, Confederates never got close to expertly placed Union artillery at Malvern Hill.

The afternoon sun is scorching hot and therefore Malvern Hill, always inviting, now looks doubly so as it lifts its forest crown in the distance. What a welcome thing it was to the marching thousands, whose backs were towards a foe eager to smite, the veterans of that hard campaign no doubt recall. As I approached there came to mind that bit of verse made of the other Malvern in Worcestershire in the time when Charles, the first English King of the name, still kept his head between his shoulders:

Great Malvern!
When western winds do rock 
Both corn and country.
Thy hill doth break: the shock --
They cannot hurt thee;
When waters great abound, 
And many a country's drowned,
Thou standest safe and sound,
Oh, praise the Lord!

                      PANORAMA: Confederate's view of Malvern Hill battlefield. 
                                         (Click at upper right for full-screen view.)

The road leading up the plateau to Mrs. Alexander's house, which may be seen when one is ten miles away, is gravelly and hard to climb. The farming land on the plateau stretches tor a mile and a half along the James, commanding that river, but it is poorly cultivated. Many places that were cleared at the time of the battle are now in scrub pine, which is particularly thick on the slope up which D. H. Hill hurled his lines and down which leaden missiles flew so fast that he left five thousand men dead and dying in his path.

The ravines running from the plateau to the thick woods towards the north and east sometimes after heavy rains give up skeletons, and the woods below contain many evidences of the desperate assault. A year or so ago, some oak timber was cut from this Malvern slope and hauled to a sawmill on Turkey Island creek. One day the saw struck a shell and there wasn't any more need of the keen-toothed steel for that log. Saw, sawyer, log and mill roof went off in various directions much in the same way as the things about the Brandywine powder mills are in the habit of doing.

While Frederick Betz was hunting in the thick timber last fall he came upon three guns resting against a large oak tree. The stocks were rotten and the bark of the tree had grown around the barrels, but there they stood, silent sentries of Malvern -- [George] McClellan's refuge and the Grand Army's steadfast rock.

--  G.M.

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'Scene sickens the sight': Destruction of Fredericksburg in 1862

A cropped enlargement of a war-time image of Fredericksburg, Va.
(Timothy O'Sullivan | Library of Congress)

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Bombarded by artillery and pillaged by the U.S. Army, Fredericksburg, Va., was a wreck in December 1862. "Beyond all hope of recovery," wrote a New York Tribune correspondent shortly after the Federals re-crossed the Rappahannock River after their humiliating defeat.

Days after the battle, Union dead lay in "every part of town," according to a reporter. Observers saw homes riddled with shot and shells. Rampaging soldiers had looted houses, haphazardly tossing the contents on the streets. Churches, used as military hospitals, were a shambles.

"All who passed through the village of Sharpsburg, two days after the battle of Antietam," the Tribune reporter noted, "thought it would be almost impossible to make a town look more desolate and forsaken, but the appearance of Sharpsburg, as compared to Fredericksburg, is homely and pleasant."

On Dec. 23, 1862, the Richmond Enquirer published on Page 1 a richly detailed account by a Southern correspondent who had visited the town six days earlier. The reporter's venom practically oozed from the page.

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War-time sketch by Arthur Lumley shows Union soldiers pillaging Fredericksburg on Dec. 12, 1862.
(Library of Congress collection)

(Special correspondence of the Richmond "Enquirer")

-- Fredericksburg, Va., Dec. 17, 1862

The day is gone, and darkness has settled into night. I wrote you last night of what I had heard in regard to matters hereabouts. To-night I can appeal to facts which mine own eyes have witnessed, and to observations common to all who chose to make them, "in vindication," as the Brute Butler once said, "of the truth of history." But where shall I begin, or in what sequence shall I recount the sights which I have this day witnessed?

Fredericksburg has been sacked and in part burned. Would to Heaven that not one stone had been left upon another, rather than it should have been the scene of such fiendish work, as is everywhere discernable! Had Satan, in the councils of Hell, called together the worst spirits of the damned, and charged them to put out upon this people the concentrated vials of their wrath, I honestly believe less mischief would have been done by them than the "Union restoring" Yankees.

A cropped enlargement of an 1864 image shows damage
 to a house on Caroline Street in Fredericksburg.
Much of the damage probably was caused in 1862.

The scene sickens the sight, and human language is inadequate to express the amount and manner of injuries inflicted. Not a single dwelling, office or out-house in the town escaped their search, use and abuse. Where families remained, it was only to be insulted by the ruffianly mob, whose incentive to action, if not battle cry, was "booty and destruction."

A most respectable gentleman of the town, whose house had been plundered on Thursday night, was awakened by efforts made on Friday night to force it open. Hastening at once to admit them, rather than have his portal destroyed, he was bidden to prepare supper for the party. On replying that his provisions had all been destroyed on the previous night, the leader of the impudent gang of thieves, with pistol in hand, said, "I must see for myself that what you say is so."

"Very well," said the gentleman, "Come on."

He did so, and looking at but one room, that sight was enough for a thieving Yankee. He said, "I am satisfied," and left. The same gentleman met General Patrick Preston the same day, and having known him when here as Military Governor, extended his hand to him and asked for a guard to protect his property. Preston replied, with much feeling, "I cannot take your hand; the time is past for that; nor will I protect your property; if you can persuade the men not to injure your effects you can do so; if not, you must take the consequences."

This leads to the observation that the pillaging and wanton destruction of property was not only permitted by those in command, but authorized, In other words, the Yankee troops sacked the town as their reward for crossing the river. In proof of this, on Monday, the day of their departure, wagons were busy running all day carrying off bedding, furniture, and whatever else they could bear away. The damage to the town can be estimated at $750,000; and this I think, a low figure -- if one should question this, he has but to visit the town and see the amount of property actually destroyed, and then contemplate the wanton abuse which everywhere meets the gaze.

The Fredericksburg Baptist Church suffered significant
damage during the war. (Library of Congress)

Nearly every door in town has been broken, windows are torn from their places, shutters wrenched forcibly from the walls, fencing pulled down, scattered and burned, beds ripped open and the feathers or straw, as the case may be, strewn over floors, streets and alleys, mirror frames scattered here and there, cribbed of their glasses, crockery and glass were broken into a thousand fragments, printing offices pitched into pi, flour wasted on every square and corner of the streets, the houses that are left rifled with shot and shell through sides and roofs, books taken from libraries, backs torn off and leaves flying in every direction; even children's clothing and play things ripped to pieces and scattered to the winds. Provisions of all sorts stolen, and what could not be used, destroyed.

Dead Yankees are lying in every part of the town -- and in the thick profusion in the Fair Grounds. Every iron safe in the city was forcibly broken open and their contents abstracted, as far as was valuable, and the rest consigned to the flames. Merchants's books of accounts in every instance mutilated, destroyed or carried off. The grave-stones, that for years have silently marked the last resting place of the dead, have been laid hold of with violent hands and mutilated or destroyed.

The day is gone, and darkness has settled into night. I wrote you last night of what I had heard in regard to matters hereabouts. To-night I can appeal to facts which mine own eyes have witnessed, and to observations common to all who chose to make them.

A close-up of an 1864 photograph of the Baptist Church
in Fredericksburg reveals extensive damage.

The arms and legs of dead Yankees challenge the sight at every step. The walls of houses are scribbled over with the wretched vulgarity and obscenities, and the houses in some instances turned into stables and even used for worse purposes. The sanctuaries of the living God have been violated and abused. Merciful Father in Heaven what a recital and what a people! We could go on in our recital, it seems to us, ad infinitum; but we forbear. Our enemies provoked in all this, the vengeance not of man, but of Jehovah.

On Friday there were rioting with devilish lust and unbridled license. On Saturday the bloody and fatal battle field told the word of awful retribution so recently evoked and so signally manifested. The tale of blood and carnage was truly frightful. Our men, shielded by natural and Providential barriers in the hands of the Almighty, administered a most terrible chastisement to those who had outraged man and defied God. The work is done, and the almost entire appropriation of the houses of the town as hospitals, and the further fact, that many of their wounded had to be cared for in the streets, where they have since died, and where their bodies still remain, satisfy the belief that the shock of battle to them was appalling in the highest degree. Fifteen thousand will not cover their loss -- my word for it.

I have conversed with citizens of intelligence, and from all the information I can obtain, there were at least 60,000 Yankees in the town prepared to engage in the fight on Saturday. It may have gone up to 75,000. Every street running parallel with the river was literally packed with the Yankees, whilst the sidewalks of the streets running at right angles with the river as many were placed as it was deemed safe to put in such position. Not only was this the case but numerous private lots were full of troops likewise. This, be it remembered, was only on their right. On their left they had a force equally as large, if not larger.

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THEN & NOW

1864 photograph of severely damaged houses on Hanover Street and George Street extended. Damage to the  residences, long attributed to Union artillery, may have been caused by Confederate guns during December 1862 battle. |   Mega-Then & Now site. 

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I think there can be no doubt that the officers would have renewed the fight on Monday, could they have gotten the men to the work, or have relied upon them. For they so announced here and so telegraphed to their journals -- but it was no go. They themselves admitted that 500,000 men could not have carried our position. They left on Monday, evidently alarmed lest [Stonewall] Jackson, aided by Providence and high water, should cut them off. Their officers, who came over under flag of truce to-day, wonder why Gen. [Robert E.] Lee did not fire upon the town. To us it is now wonder. That pure and able general desired neither Yankee blood nor life, and with far less reason did he wish to involve a slaughter of Yankees with probable destruction to lives of our people and to the certain destruction of their property. His forebearance is creditable to his sagacity and humanity, though the shelling would have enhanced the victory and resulted in the death of thousands of our unprincipled and malignant foe.

The town, of course, looks desolate; not over two hundred citizens remained. It is to be regretted that since the Yankees have left little or no effort has been made to protect what little property the thieving Yankees spared.

The town is left in a most shamefully filthy condition. Some steps ought to be taken by our Generals to put it in better order. There are not enough citizens left to do it.

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Video: 5 minutes at Shy's Hill, a Battle of Nashville site

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Join me on my walk to the crest of Shy’s Hill, where Confederate left flank collapsed on Dec. 16, 1864, leading to massive defeat for John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee. The Battle of Nashville Preservation Society owns a portion of Shy’s Hill and leases the summit from the Tennessee Historical Commission. It is protected by a conservation easement through the Land Trust For Tennessee. Shy’s Hill today is located in residential neighborhood.

The Wilderness: Snapshots of death from a 'most lonely place'

Cropped enlargement of 1865 image of remains of soldiers in the Wilderness, near Cemetery No. 2.
(Library of Congress)

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Faint from loss of blood, a grievously wounded young soldier lay alone near scores of Confederate dead in the Wilderness. Unable to stand, the "poor fellow," a Union soldier observed, slowly crawled across the blood-soaked ground gathering violets. He had already made a beautiful bouquet.

3rd Vermont Captain Erastus Buck, wounded on 
May 5, died in Washington on May 22, 1864. 
A thousand people attended a service for him in 
East Charleston, Vt., according to an obituary
in the Orleans Independent Standard.

"I saw him taken up tenderly and borne away wearing a brave, sweet, touching smile," the witness recalled.

The fate of the boy, like so many other wounded who suffered in the dense, wooded undergrowth of Virginia in early May 1864, is lost to history. Perhaps he survived despite his serious wound. More likely he died -- one of hundreds who perished from wounds suffered in the battle.

Then came the funerals. Scores of services were held in the North and South. Sometimes with a body of the deceased, often without. Here are snapshots of what Vermont lost in the Wilderness -- the "most lonely place I ever saw," according to a sharpshooter from the state. In the spring and summer of 1864, the Green Mountain State's newspapers were filled with death and despair.

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The corpse of 2nd Vermont Lieutenant Colonel John Steele Tyler, a "mere boy of only 21 years," arrived at the train depot in Brattleboro, Vt., about 10:30 a.m. on May 24. The remains were received by officers from the 8th Vermont, who were en route to New Orleans, and a "company of invalids from the garrison" near town. Tyler's body was escorted to the town hall, where his nearly 90-year-old grandmother was among the mourners.

Wounded in the thigh at the Wilderness, Lt. Col. John Steele Tyler
died in a hotel in New York.  (John Gibson collection)

From a prominent family, Tyler, the son of a reverend, had been promoted only days before the Battle of the Wilderness. Shortly after he was shot, John realized his wound, which sliced his femoral artery, was mortal. Still, he lingered for nearly three weeks, dying in the Metropolitan Hotel in New York on May 23. A civilian doctor who examined him there believed the wound was caused by buckshot, not a bullet.

"Death, in a sudden and mysterious manner, has removed him," Vermont's governor wrote to Tyler's uncle, a judge, "and we are left to mourn the loss of a brave and worthy officer." Tyler received a posthumous promotion to colonel from the governor.

Throughout the day in Brattleboro, citizens paid their respects to Tyler, many of them placing flowers atop his coffin.

"Appropriate verses were also stuck on the bayonets of the stacks of arms at the head and foot of the coffin," a newspaper reported. One of them caught the eye of a reporter:

"How beautiful is death when earned by virtue! Who would not be that youth? What pity is it that we can die but once to save our country! Why sit this sadness on your brows, my friends? I should have blushed if Cato's house had stood Secure, and flourished in a civil war."

At 6 p.m., Tyler's remains were escorted to the Episcopal church by two fire companies, a company of the 17th Vermont, local cadets and a company of "invalids," who were stationed at a nearby military camp.  After the church service, a band played a dirge as the casket was escorted to a nearby cemetery. During the graveside service, mourners were drenched during a brief thunder shower and startled by "one very vivid stroke of lightning."

Muffled drums rolled. The casket was lowered into the ground. Three farewell shots were fired over the grave.

"Seldom have the people of Brattleboro been called on to witness a more solemn and impressive pageant," the Vermont Record reported.

             PANORAMA: Vermont Brigade monument in the woods near the intersection 
        of Brock and Orange Plank roads. (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)

Captain George Randall of the 6th Vermont was shot through both legs above the knee on May 5, the first day of the fighting, and lived until about 4 p.m. that day

"He was decently interred and the enemy never rifled his pockets or polluted his person," an officer recalled in an account published in a Vermont newspaper. "Even to the last, he would never give up, but remarked that he was not wounded very severely. He bled to death, and I doubt if medical aid had been near at first whether he would have survived."

The 21-year-old soldier's remains rest in an unknown grave in Virginia.

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22-year-old William W. Wilson, a private in the 1st U.S, Sharpshooters, died in a hospital. 
He had been in 27 battles, according to his obituary in The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press on June 15, 1864.

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In Calais, Vt., on June 5, a large congregation assembled to "testify to their respect to the memory" of 25-year-old William Stowe. A private in the 2nd Vermont, he was killed near the intersection of Brock and Orange Plank roads. Stowe was part of the Vermont Brigade -- five regiments of soldiers from the Green Mountain State -- which suffered 1,234 casualties making a desperate stand on May 5-6, 1864.

"Was the result commensurate to the sacrifice?" Lewis Grant, the brigade's commander, wrote weeks after the battle. "Whether it was or not, the battle once commenced had to be fought. There was safety only in success."

Stowe's death was "peculiarly distressing," according to a local newspaper. "He was the first in town to respond to his country's call for three years' men and enlisted into the Second Vermont Regiment, of which he continued a brave and honored member, beloved and respected by all his comrades."

"His term of service having nearly expired, he was fondly anticipating a speedy return home, and a happy sojourn with affectionate friends," it added. "But instead of his welcome presence came the sad intelligence that he was shot in battle in the afternoon of the first day's fighting."

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Lucius Ingalls, the only son of Azel and Leafy Ingalls, died in a hospital in Washington from wounds
suffered at the Wilderness, according to a brief account in the Vermont Journal on July 9, 1864.
His right arm had been amputated. Ingalls was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

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After conducting the funeral in early June for George Whitfield, a private in the 17th Vermont, a preacher made a proposal.  "And I move that when this war shall have ended, and when this town shall have purchased land for its contemplated cemetery," he said, "that a separate lot be preserved expressly for our fallen brave of this war."

"And then upon our festive days, our national anniversaries and the like," he added, "let the good ole 'Stars and Stripes' be unfurled there, that their drifting shadows float above the honored dust of those who laid down their lives in their defense."

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 Newton Stone was killed on May 5, 1864. A lawyer as a civilian, he had "two brothers fighting
 for the cause for which he gave his life," the St. Johnsbury (Vt.) Caledonian noted
on May 27, 1864. He was buried in Readsboro, Vt.

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In early August in Cabot, Vt., a service was held for a pair of brothers, Edwin and Abel Morrill. A captain in the 11th Vermont, Edwin was mortally wounded in the bowels trying to escape after he was captured at the Battle of Weldon Railroad in Virginia. Abel, acting adjutant in the 3rd Vermont, was killed at the Wilderness. Shortly after the war, Edwin's remains were recovered and re-buried in his native state. Abel's body was never found.

"Resolutions of condolence and sympathy were adopted," the local newspaper reported about the brothers. "The exercises were largely attended by sympathizing friends from Cabot and adjoining towns."

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Corporal Lucian Bingham of Morristown, Vt., died in a Washington hospital from wounds suffered
at the Wilderness. The 23-year-old was a "worthy brother" and a "brave soldier," according to this account
in the Lamoille Newsdealer on July 27, 1864. He's buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

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On June 25, 1864, The Burlington (Vt.) Times reprinted a poem by George Baker, recalling the seriously wounded young man picking flowers in the Wilderness. It's a fitting tribute, perhaps, to all the soldiers who suffered there.

IN THE WILDERNESS

Mangled, uncared for, suffering thro’ the night

With heavenly patience the poor boy had lain;

Under the dreary shadows, left and right,

Groaned on the wounded, stiffened out the slain.

What faith sustained his lone,

Brave heart to make no moan,

To send no cry from that blood-sprinkled sod,

Is a close mystery with him and God.

But when the light came, and the morning dew

Glittered around him, like a golden lake,

And every dripping flower with deepened hue

Looked through its tears for very pity’s sake,

He moved his aching head

Upon his rugged bed,

And smiled as a blue violet, virgin-meek,

Laid her pure kiss upon his withered cheek.

At once there circled in his waking heart

A thousand memories of distant home;

Of how those same blue violets would start

Along his native fields, and some would roam

Down his dear humming brooks,

To hide in secret nooks,

And, shyly met, in nodding circles swing,

Like gossips murmuring at belated Spring.

And then he thought of the beloved hands

That with his own had plucked the modest flower.

The blue-eyed maiden, crowned with golden bands,

Who ruled as sovereign of that sunny hour.

She at whose soft command

He joined the mustering band,

She for whose sake he lay so firm and still,

Despite his pangs, not questioned then her will.

So, lost in thought, scarce conscious of the deed,

Culling the violets, here and there he crept

Slowly—ah! slowly,—for his wound would bleed;

And the sweet flowers themselves half smiled, half wept,

To be thus gathered in

By hands so pale and thin,

By fingers trembling as they neatly laid

Stem upon stem, and bound them in a braid.

The strangest posy ever fashioned yet

Was clasped against the bosom of the lad,

As we, the seekers for the wounded, set

His form upon our shoulders bowed and sad;

Though he but seemed to think

How violets nod and wink;

And as we cheered him, for the path was wild,

He only looked upon his flowers and smiled.

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Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES

-- Lamoille Newsdealer, Hyde Park, Vt., July 27, 1864
-- Orleans Independent Standard, Irasburgh, Vt., June 3, 1864.
-- St. Albans (Vt.) Daily Messenger, May 16, 1864.
-- St. John's (Vt.) Caledonian, May 27, 1864.
-- The Burlington (Vt.) Weekly Sentinel, June 10, 1864.
-- The Burlington (Vt.) Daily Times, June 25, 1864.
-- Vermont Journal, July 9, 1864.
-- Vermont Record, Brandon, Vt., June 3, 1864, June 24, 1864.
-- Vermont Watchman and State Journal, Aug. 19, 1864.