Tales from the road: Remembering 2nd Iowa fallen from Fort Donelson

On Feb. 15, 1862, the 2nd Iowa attacked Confederates at the outer defenses of Fort Donelson.

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On a gloomy-gray Saturday morning, we walk the steep ground where the 2nd Iowa charged at the Battle of Fort Donelson on Feb. 15, 1862 — a profound experience, especially near the battle’s anniversary.

Near the crest of the hill — perhaps along the lip of a Confederate trench marked today by a weathered historical tablet — the Iowans buried their dead, Private Newton Haldeman of Company C wrote. These poor souls were part of the roughly three dozen soldiers in the regiment killed that day: 

• Private George Washington Howell, the 10th of 13 children and son of a cotton-batting manufacturer.
• Captain Jonathan Slaymaker, whose obituary did not spare grisly detail: slivers of his pocketknife exploded by a Minié ball severed his femoral artery.
• Captain Charles Cloutman, son of a postmaster.
  

As I tramp the hallowed ground, Haldeman’s words bring the grim aftermath of battle to life: 

“I have read of the glaring eyes and gaping mouth[s] of dead soldiers, but here lay my friends asleep; the eyes are closed, the mouth retains its natural position. This is not like the dead of our homestead. I could not but kneel by some of those that I thought must still be alive, but their foreheads were cold; they slept the sleep that knows no waking. There in silent repose lay friend and foe side by side.”

But the story did not end on that hill at Fort Donelson. Families and neighbors journeyed from across Iowa to reclaim their loved ones. In the days and weeks that followed, towns came together for funerals marked by quiet processions, folded flags and overflowing churches.

From left, the gravestones in Iowa of 2nd Iowa Captain Charles Cloutman,
Private George Washington Howell and Captain Jonathan Slaymaker. (Find A Grave)

On March 8, Howell and the bodies of five other 2nd Iowa soldiers — all in “rough board boxes” — arrived in Davenport on the same train. A local newspaper called their joint funeral "one of the most solemn hours" in city history. The final journeys of Captains Slaymaker, the nephew of a Mexican War general, and Cloutman, the married father of four children, included a trip on the steamer John D. Perry.

“The corpse was as perfectly natural as we ever saw, though life had been extinct for the space of twelve days,” a local newspaper wrote of Slaymaker, 26. “Every feature was perfect and possessed no traces of severity which is said sometimes to settle upon the countenances of those who fall in battle.”

Nearly 100 soldiers escorted Slaymaker’s coffin to St. Luke’s Church in Davenport, packed for the occasion. A silver plate with his name, company and regiment inscribed adorned the coffin.

“Among the young men of our city,” the newspaper wrote, “he was in the first rank.” Howell’s death, it noted, “plunged into sorrow a numerous family, of which he was almost the idol.”

After his remains arrived by train in Ottumwa, the bullet that killed Cloutman was removed from his body, perhaps as a macabre memento. A local newspaper noted the 38-year-old officer never got to see his youngest child.

“It is an interesting circumstance that it was born on the morning after its father was followed to the grave,” the paper reported.

As we walk the battleground amid trees with barren limbs and piles of rusty-brown leaves, the 21st century seems so far away. These stories, once recounted in letters, diaries and newspapers, are now mostly forgotten. Yet they linger at Fort Donelson, waiting to be remembered.

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SOURCES

• The Morning Democrat, Davenport, Iowa, Feb. 21, 27, 28, March 10, 1862
• Ottumwa Semi-Weekly Courier, Ottumwa, Iowa, Feb. 26, 1862