Letters from Triune: 'Fat,' 'lazy' and the high price of whiskey

Photo illustration of newspaper clippings of accounts from wartime Triune.

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First in an occasional series

For a journalist like me, there’s nothing quite like reading soldiers' letters home printed in hometown newspapers. After my recent visit to the Triune earthworks — the maze of rifle pits, trenches and redoubts just 25 minutes east of Franklin — a letter from a 96th Illinois soldier struck me in a way it might not have before. 

A pond among the earthworks at Triune.
Did soldiers use this?

Dated June 13, 1863, from “Camp at Triune,” Private Samuel F. Vose writes with a mix of humor and candor that pulls me right into camp life. The men are healthy but filthy, freshly paid but only moderately drunk thanks to the high price of whiskey, and settled into the peculiar boredom of waiting behind fortifications in a small yet strategically important Tennessee town 30 miles south of Nashville. 

Vose recounts a brush with Confederate forces — pickets fired on, batteries moved forward, shells sailing overhead — and notes "some killed" in his brigade. Reading it, I can almost hear the echoes of those guns across the fields, and I feel, just a little, what it was like to be there.

Camp at Triune, Tenn., June 13th, 1863

Dear Brother L.— 

As I had written you a few lines and got a few in return, I thought I would write you a letter so as to get one in return.

Well, the first thing is we are all well, fat and lazy, dirty, lousy and ragged, and in good fighting condition. We got our pay for two months yesterday, but did not get very drunk on account of whisky being so high — two dollars per bottle, and beer ten cents a thimble full. There was a few though who got so that they could lie on their backs a great deal easier than they could keep on their feet, so they preferred doing it but were interrupted occasionally by the rise of whisky which somewhat soiled their garments.

The country around here is very good and all the old planters seem to be pretty well off, but I don’t think this war is helping them much. Triune is about as large as Hainesville, and a good deal such a looking place. The fortifications here are good and strong.

Union earthworks snake through the woods at Triune.

The report is that the rebels are within ten miles of us thirty thousand strong, and intend to make an attack on us soon, but I don’t think they will make much if they do. We had a little brush with them last Thursday, and came nearer getting into a fight than we ever have before. They commenced about ten o’clock in the morning by firing on the pickets. We were all got out in line of battle, the batteries in front. The rebels brought up one battery within a quarter of a mile and opened on the 12th Chicago Battery. They had it pretty lively for a while. 

We took all our tents down and sent them back of the intrenchments. The 18th Ohio battery then came into line and commenced firing, and our regiment supported it. Company A went out as skirmishers. The rebels then got some guns to play on us, and the shells whistled over us pretty lively for a while but all went too high to do us any damage. It made some of the boys dodge down their heads, but all in our regiment stood and did not get frightened.

Some of the boys in the 84th Indiana skedaddled and got behind the intrenchments. The first shell that went over scared the sutler’s clerks so that they grabbed up their money box, as they supposed, but it proved to be a box of matches, and ran for a safe place and left their goods. The boys pitched into the eatables and would have destroyed the whole if it had not been for the Quartermaster. He put their things on a wagon and sent them off. When Bingham found he had got the wrong box he mustered up courage enough to come back and get the right one which the boys had not found.

Just beyond Triune earthworks,
a mansion rises.

Wilson of Libertyville was one of the clerks, and had always said if the boys got into a fight he should take a gun and go in with them. He started for home yesterday morning, firm in the belief that he had had a barrel shot from under him. Bingham feels quite cheap about it, he says he supposes that the boys will write home a parcel of lies about it.

I saw a body of armed rebels for the first time; they were making a charge on the pickets at the time Gen. [George] Granger was at the 12th Chicago Battery. He turned a gun on them and sighted it himself, and when they stopped to fire he landed a shell in their midst, but they were not long in getting back to the woods again. The batteries and cavalry did most of the fighting. Company A got a few shots at them and so did some of the pickets. One Sergeant in Company K killed two rebels. They left about 3 P.M.

There was some killed in our brigade, and the cavalry lost some, I don’t know how many. We took some prisoners and killed some, but I don’t know the number. There was two spies hung at Franklin last week. They were passing themselves off as Inspecting Generals from Rosecrans, and had looked the works all over and were just going out of the lines when a cavalry boy recognized one of them, as an officer in the rebel army.

Yours truly, S. F. Yost

Postscript: Yost, a farmer, apparently was some kind of character. In the 96th Illinois' retreat at Resaca in May 1864, he suffered a dislocated arm. Then the Confederates compelled the regiment — Vose included — to withdraw again.

"Stripping off all of his clothing but his pants, the surgeon had just succeeded in pulling the dislocated  arm in place when the stampede begun," a regimental historian wrote. "Vose ran back without many clothes on, an object at once pitiable and laughable, as he made his way to the  rear," the regimental historian wrote. (Page 326.)

Vose mustered out in the summer of 1865. He died in Florida in 1924.

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SOURCE: The Waukegan (Wis.) Weekly Gazette, June 27, 1863